Rob Riggle is yelling at me from his car. Not in an angry way. He’s just white-knuckling a steering wheel on a rainy highway, fresh off visiting troops at Fort Riley and Camp Pendleton, and I’m grateful his brain decided to pump up the volume. It must be raining sheets out there in Kansas.
“I apologize if I’ve been barking,” he says. “I’m driving on the highway in the rain, so I feel like I have to yell for some reason.”
This is pretty much the perfect way to talk about his new book, “Grit, Spit, and Never Quit.” It’s part Marine Corps mindset, part true Hollywood story, part motivational seminar from one of America’s funniest veterans (also a writer, comedian, actor, improv performer, and future hatchet master).
The subtitle calls it “A Marine’s Guide to Comedy and Life,” which sounds like a bit, even though if you’re a Riggle fan, you know he’s done both. But when he really gets into it, he’s talking about enduring Hollywood and Operation Enduring Freedom; how he ended up there and the commitment, perseverance, and discipline it took to pursue his dreams.
“It’s kind of a motivational memoir of sorts,” Riggle says. “It talks about not just the military, but also my experiences growing up and my time in show business. It kind of runs the gauntlet of life’s journey.”
The book opens not on a soundstage but in the back of a C-130 dropping into Afghanistan in the dark, just months after 9/11. On paper, he’s an officer with more than a decade in the Marine Corps Reserve. In his head, he’s also a struggling New York improv guy who was onstage at Upright Citizens Brigade roughly five minutes ago. That split-screen—war zone on one side, black-box theater on the other—is the whole vibe of the book.
He describes how the title emerged from that mindset. “Grit, Spit and Never Quit” isn’t an official Marine motto, but it might as well be. The book lays out the idea that if you just keep showing up—to rehearsal, to drill, to the ugly parts of your life—you give yourself a shot.
The result is part war stories, part coming-of-age comedy, and part dad-energy pep talk. It’s a love letter to family, Marines, comedy, and the weirdos who helped him not stay a coward. Riggle hit gold with a motivational memoir that’s funny, occasionally heavy, frequently hilarious, sometimes whiplash-inducing when it jumps from goofy jokes to life-and-death stuff in a few pages.
The early chapters are aggressively un-glamorous. Little Rob is not a natural-born warrior; he’s a sensitive Kansas kid who sobs during “The Velveteen Rabbit” and tries to hide his tears inside his desk, failing spectacularly. His bully problem is classic: neighborhood dirtbags, endless cheap shots, no idea how to fight back. When he finally runs home in tears, his mom—a five-foot-two English teacher raised hard on a Missouri farm—listens to the story, walks him back outside, shuts the garage door behind him and basically says, tells him to handle it.
It’s the book in miniature: no shortcuts, no cavalry, no big speech. Just a small, terrified kid realizing no one is coming to save him and swinging anyway.
Riggle is at his best when he leans into that weakness instead of cosplaying as a tough guy. He spends a whole stretch of junior high learning how to be mean on purpose, using jokes like brass knuckles. Then, in a rare moment of teenage self-awareness, he realizes that being funny and being cruel are not the same job. He makes a rule for himself: stop using the joke as a shiv, start trying to make people feel good when they walk away.
It’s not subtle. This is not a man afraid of a capital-L “Lesson.” But it is surprisingly honest. One chapter has him delivering a truly disgusting insult to a classmate, then immediately roasting himself on the page for how lazy and vicious it was. The next chapter has him basking in the slow social payoff of just not being a jerk all the time.
Then puberty hits him like a Marvel origin sequence. He grows five inches over one summer, adds muscle, loses the braces, and walks into high school as a completely different person. Casual acquaintances don’t recognize him; they have to tilt their heads up and say his name like a question: “Riggle?”
This is where the book pivots into pure 1980s teen-movie energy: quoting Rodney Dangerfield, worshipping Eddie Murphy and Bill Murray like saints, memorizing George Carlin albums, and annoying waiters by doing “Caddyshack” bits over steaks.
It’s also the part where you realize: this guy did the homework. Before he was the loud guy in Will Ferrell movies, he was exactly the kind of kid who would memorize “Delirious “and wear out a Carlin cassette. He’s not some random ex-Marine who got lucky at an audition; he’s a comedy nerd who just happened to be heavily armed for most of his young life.
The Marine Corps sections are the book’s most cinematic and most relatable: the yellow footprints at Quantico, a drill instructor with a Smokey Bear hat, barking at the candidates and cutting the air with knife-hand gestures while Riggle’s inner monologue runs through “Full Metal Jacket” quotes. It was what we all did in basic training, even if we weren’t in the Marine Corps. There’s also the quietly terrifying recognition that this bus ride is the last time he’ll be “a regular U.S. citizen” for a while. Maybe most of us are familiar with that realization, too.
Riggle is never the hardest guy in the room. He’s the guy in the room who’s convinced he’s going to screw up the bathroom request protocol and die of shame before he ever sees a rifle. His Afghanistan material is handled in the same key: serious, but not solemn. The danger is real, the stakes are high, and he’s smart enough not to turn deployment into a backdrop for bits. Yet even here, the voice stays recognizably Riggle—a little panicked, a little sarcastic, fully aware that his presence as a reservist in a war zone is bizarre. The book is careful not to turn combat into content.
“Grit, Spit, and Never Quit” promises a kind of white Monster energy masculinity, and but what’s really unique is what’s underneath that. Riggle is writing a book about course corrections. About deciding not to be ruled by fear. About learning early on that being the funniest bully in the hallway is still being the bully. About getting knocked down, embarrassed, suspended, yelled at, and then trying again a little less stupid the next time.
As celebrity memoirs go, this one earns its existence. It isn’t a victory lap. It’s more like an after-action report filed by your best friend who accidentally became a Marine officer and a Hollywood comic and is trying to document, in plain language, how not to waste your shot.
If you’re allergic to motivational anything, you’ll roll your eyes at the title and some of the more earnest closing lines. If you’ve ever wanted to know how a weepy, bullied kid from Kansas ends up dropping into war zones and then screaming fake sports analysis on “Fox NFL Sunday,” this is the connective tissue.
And if you’re a 20-something drifting between dead-end jobs and half-formed ambitions, the book’s central argument is annoyingly hard to dismiss: there are no shortcuts. There is just getting onstage, getting in the arena, getting your ass handed to you, and then, one more time, not quitting. “Grit, Spit, and Never Quit” is a portrait of how one very specific American archetype (the jock-goofball-Marine) actually builds a life, it’s weirdly compelling. You come for the guy who yells in Will Ferrell movies; you leave with something closer to a chaotic, joke-laden manual on how to grow up.
“Grit, Spit and Never Quit” is available wherever books are sold, and at online retailers in hardcover, ebook, or audiobook (yes, read by the author).
