Book Review - 'The Chris Farley Show,' by Tom Farley Jr. and Tanner Colby - Review - NYTimes.com The world probably hasn't been waiting breathlessly for a biography of Chris Farley, the high-energy, lowbrow "Saturday Night Live" star who lived hard and, a decade ago, died young. For one thing, Farley's story, while undeniably sad, is also undeniably familiar: talented performer rockets to stardom and then plummets back to earth, the victim of his own excessive appetites. We've heard it before. Then there is the issue of Farley's place in the comedy pantheon. The parallels between Farley and John Belushi, his acknowledged idol, are plentiful and a little eerie: both were outsize performers in every sense of the word; both were Midwesterners who learned their craft at Second City and became famous on "SNL"; both had serious problems with drugs and alcohol; both died at 33. But as Chevy Chase says in so many words toward the end of "The Chris Farley Show," Chris Farley was no John Belushi. Chase, no stranger to either the demands of physical comedy or the perils of substance abuse, recalls telling Farley, in the course of urging him to clean up his act, that "when you overdose or kill yourself, you will not have the same acclaim that John did," because Farley's "record of accomplishment" and "cultural status" were not on the same level as Belushi's. Harsh as that assessment may be, it seems about right. So is Chris Farley worth taking seriously? "The Chris Farley Show" offers a persuasive argument. By plumbing the memories of friends, family members and co-workers, it digs beneath the buffoonish exterior and uncovers a complex human being. It paints a vivid portrait of a young man who was very troubled, yes, but also very sweet, very gifted, very charismatic and very focused - endearingly so - on making people laugh. An oral history rather than a full-fledged biography, "The Chris Farley Show" could have been more tightly organized, and it could have dug a little deeper. It makes no claim to objectivity: one of the two authors, Tom Farley Jr., is Chris's brother (the other, Tanner Colby, is a co-author of a biography of Belushi), and they stack the deck a little when it comes to Farley's career. Take their view of the movie "Tommy Boy," his first starring vehicle. The director, Peter Segal, notes that it was "resoundingly dissed by every critic." The critics had it wrong, the authors say; it was actually "a minor classic." Surely there are those beyond Farley's circle who would rate "Tommy Boy" somewhere between masterpiece and disaster, but all we get here is a nuance-free chorus of cheerleading and critic-bashing. Still, the book does manage to make the case, via abundant praise from numerous knowledgeable and not necessarily partisan witnesses, that had Farley lived he could have transcended his reputation as, in Chase's words, "an overweight guy who could fall on his stomach and had one or two funny things in his career." Former Second City colleagues recall a performer with far more comedic range than "SNL" viewers ever saw. His "Tommy Boy" co-star Brian Dennehy says he had the makings of a first-rate dramatic actor. To the authors" credit, they do not pull their punches when it comes to the problems that stifled Farley's potential and eventually killed him. The stories of his epic binges and his countless trips to rehab and back are presented with empathy and context - his father, to whom he was devoted, was an alcoholic who apparently never sought treatment - but without excuses. That those stories become repetitive only adds to their impact. After a while I found myself wishing that I could reach into the book, grab Farley by the lapels and beg him to cut it out - and, more realistically, that someone had been able to get that message across to him in real time. The Chris Farley we meet here is both funnier and more lovable than the typical celebrity drug casualty, which makes "The Chris Farley Show" both sadder and more frustrating than the typical just-say-no cautionary tale. Peter Keepnews is a staff editor at The Times.