Chuck Lorre: Musings of a sitcom king

By Frazier Moore

AP Television Writer

NEW YORK

Chuck Lorre — whose 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.

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.

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 (Calif.) Family Clinic.)

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 “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.

“It was a terrible time. It was awful,” he goes on. “I was really heartbroken by how it all played out. And angry. He was my friend. We were all concerned about him. We thought he was going to die.”

Sheen now stars in a TBS sitcom “Anger Management,” while “Men” has entered its 10th season with Ashton Kutcher in his sophomore year as Sheen’s replacement.