John Dies at the End by David Wong

As a young boy, my brother tended to get Cracked magazine rather than Mad magazine; I think it was probably cheaper for essentially the same content (or so it seemed to a young boy). In any case, he (and therefore I) grew up with Cracked. By the time the magazine itself went under, of course, I had stopped paying attention, but at some point in the last few years, I began regularly checking the new Cracked.com, which I find is much funnier than it likely should be.

At the helm of this new digital enterprise (sans Sylvester P. Smythe) is senior editor David Wong, a pseudonym for Jason Pargin. It was really only via this association that I learned about John Dies at the End, Wong/Pargin’s satirical horror novel, recently rescued from an indie publisher by St. Martin’s Griffin. Given my positive associations with the new Cracked, giving John Dies at the End a shot was a no-brainer. Also, it’s being adapted into a movie with Paul Giamatti.

I expected more out&out slapstick and or snide commentary, but I never got it; John Dies at the End, though full of enough random events and subtle digs at horror tropes to fulfill Wong’s contractual obligations for what constitutes hilarity in horror novel. For all that, though, he’s managed what is—most of the time—and engaging “B Horror” book, the sort of which reminds me of my youth watching MonsterVision and the indomitable Joe Bob Briggs.

The book is split roughly into three parts, indicating its origins as a serial publication on the web. Its prologue (I don’t know if it was added for the final manuscript or if it existed in serial form as well) is somewhat misleading, as it introduces its characters as something of a midpoint in the story, and—if I might editorialize—assigns them a confidence and skill that they don’t have. David Wong and John Cheese are ghostbusters, or something to that effect; the prologue is intentionally vague about the nature of what they do, but it nonetheless finds the dysfunctional duo (and the dog Molly) venturing to an isolated farmhouse where, with great aplomb, they do battle against a malicious, paranormal force. Though the impression of David and John as slackers and somewhat bumbling malcontents is inescapable, one can’t help but feel as though they are just a little badass.

The start of the book proper immediately dismisses the second impression, heaving the reader bodily back to the recent past, with David and John as grunts at a struggling video rental store at an undisclosed, unremarkable Midwestern town. At a local music festival, David and John get tangled up with a lost dog, a crazy Jamaican drug dealer, and a strange drug called “soy sauce” which, it turns out, is made of cryptozoological “rods“, and gives its users rare powers such as clairvoyance if it doesn’t kill them instead. Because of this “soy sauce”, David and John are launched into a series of adventures which contain a whole host of horror and science fiction tropes, intentionally referential and somewhat scatterbrained. Shadow people from other dimensions, demons inhabiting humanoid forms comprised of sausages or cockroaches, exorcisms, lots of violence and gore that seems somehow too incredible or ridiculous to be disgusting (e.g. Kill Bill Part I), and a nonchalance with respect to the space-time continuum that is either lazy or brilliant. Continuity in general is something of a problem, either by design or simply because it was too difficult to take certain things back when published serially; Molly the dog is alive, possessed, dead, alive again, and potentially dead again, with no particular explanation as to why or how. Trips to other dimensions to meet Korrok, a demon/demigod and the book’s official(?) malefactor, pay homage to the Doom video games and turn decidedly scifi with Artificial Intelligences and ray guns. Most of this is wrapped in a frame narrative of David telling his story (or at least the first two parts) to a skeptical human interest reporter named Arnie Blondestone, and even this frame narrative ends up taking a strange twist that makes little sense because Arnie is dead before the interview even begins.

Oh Google, is there anything you can't find?

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland by Patton Oswalt

Though I don’t listen to altogether too many comedy albums, I’m a fan of Patton Oswalt, who I think is one of the smarter mainstream comics working today. To the best of my knowledge, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is his first serious attempt at a published book, and while it’s short and somewhat inconsistent, I think it’s shows a great potential for grander works.

Generally, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland reads like one of Oswalt’s standup sets: funny vignettes that border on narrative, sometimes wistful and sometimes full of dick jokes and LSD. In the book, however, Oswalt gives his natural tendency toward storytelling a little more room to breathe. This, I imagine, may be a sore point to some of Oswalt’s fans who have grown accustomed to a more immediate payoff in the brevity of his routine. But his first “real” chapter, which tells the story of his time working at the local three-screen cinema in Sterling, Virginia, is both poignant and slapstick, and is actually handled like a proper short story; the characters are built up and given personalities, the story is given context and meaning, and there’s a sense, however small, of personal engagement between the narrative equivalent of punchlines.

Oswalt proves he has chops, at least stylistically, or some larval stage thereof which could be excellent someday with proper care. In the midst of this, however, he does what many comedians will do when venturing into books: pad the pages with filler. There are short sections which would play better as stand-up bits, a graphic novel portion which, though I suppose well done, has no real business in an otherwise text-based book. This is not America: The Book wherein the premise is as graphical as it is comedic; nor is it as consistent. The first story is a high point, and at no other point of the relatively short book he he regain that peak.

The closest he comes is the title essay, which is a somewhat confusing categorization piece which labels all young personalities as either a Zombie, a Spaceship, or a Wasteland. Zombies are the lumps whose defense mechanism makes them shuffle and stumble through life in apathy; Spaceships are the social outcasts (he uses computer nerds as an example) who seek to flee the earth and watch it from a distance. Wastelands, finally, seek the scorched earth option, obliterating their past lives in an apocalypse and thereafter roaming the deserts as changed men. Oswalt counts himself among this last group (fleeing the boring safety of a planned suburb to becoming a coastal comedian and do LSD), though in fairness, this taxonomy is not particularly wonderful or insightful. What makes it compelling—maybe—is that Oswalt insists on science fiction tropes; he’s a geek’s comedian (and therefore a geek’s writer), and much of what he jokes about is informed by a childhood of progressive rock, Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, and a general Cheetos-eating, scifi-loving, fat-kid-at-dodgeball sensibility that makes fans of the same disaffected stripe love and respect him even more.

For my part, I enjoy both Oswalt’s standup and his serious writing, though I’m somewhat annoyed by this book’s tendency to conflate the two. At his best, Oswalt gives Chuck Klosterman a run for his money, and with thankfully more disdain for the sickly and sickening bits of culture that make Klosterman’s glasses fog up. At his worst, however, Oswalt’s book is a throwaway; it’s a motley of verbal bric-a-brac that doesn’t reward the effort of acquiring and reading the book instead of searching for clips of the guy on Youtube.

Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards by P. J. O'Rourke

I can remember being quite young and looking for books by Dave Barry in my local library. Invariably, I happened upon large collections by such venerated humorists as Lewis Grizzard and P.J. O’Rourke, who even in the early 90s had a large œuvre. I never got into O’Rourke at the time, because I was concerned more with Barry’s slapstick and sometime scatological approach to humor, as opposed to O’Rourke’s which was more straightforward political satire.

When I learned sometime about a decade ago that Barry was a Libertarian, I wasn’t even quite sure what it meant (I was probably about 14), other than he apparently disliked government. This is no surprise, given that a large portion of his work was dedicated to criticizing people in authority, especially the government, which was a fair target for lampooning not just by Libertarian humorists, but just about anybody. Let’s face it: the government is a big dumb ox of a target, and even dyed-in-the-wool liberals have little trouble lambasting it for wasteful spending and making jokes about Congress being the opposite of Progress.

One of the big differences between a straightforward humorist like Dave Barry (who just happens to be a Libertarian) and a pundit-cum-political-satirist like P.J. O’Rourke (who just happens to be a Libertarian) is that Barry goes for the laughs approximately 99.8% of the time; O’Rourke, by comparison, inhabits a grey area intermediate of yuks and real political commentary. He’s joined in this space by Al Franken (whose books, though not particularly funny, fall back on the “I’m a comedian” defense too often) and Jon Stewart of The Daily Show fame, and it hurts him for a number of reasons.

Let’s say that you’re a reader, like me, who considers himself something of a Leftist Libertarian, and you’re reading O’Rourke’s book. On his basic belief that, w.r.t. government, less is more, you are in theoretical (if not necessarily practical) agreement; you quibble with him on some fine points when he’s rearticulating some report from the Cato Institute. Yet you can’t help but be annoyed that whenever he feels his text is getting too turgid, he shoots his clay pigeons, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. As often as not, these aren’t even political jokes as much as they are jokes about old hags; as a common substitute, enter Bill Clinton as befuddled cocksman. It’s a startling and unnerving contrast, and one can just hear it coming out of Thomas Jefferson’s mouth: “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it [and isn't Nancy Pelosi a stupid, wrinkled Bitch?]“. Or not.

Therein lies the danger of political satire: it’s not particular funny. O’Rourke is a seasoned veteran of the field, and should know better than to peddle such easy, cheesy ad hominem blows, even if they are merely a cheap façade for his more principled political objections. The Daily Show manages to avoid a lot of this by (a) avoiding lengthy political discourse altogether and (b) doing less blatant ad hominem jokes in favor of ad argumentum jokes. For better or worse, The Daily Show doesn’t positively stand for much (recent Zadroga Bill activism excepted), and so avoids much of this problem. It’s a problem especially for O’Rourke because although he’s generally considered a satirist/humorist, he’s a very smart guy; we need conservative voices who aren’t greasy douchbags (Sean Hannity), complete nincompoops (Bill O’Reilly), or batshit-crazy caricatures (Ann Coulter). What’s more, we know he’s capable of serious journalism (or at least genuine activism); try saying that about today’s talking heads or weekly columnists squeezing out their quotidian partisan bitch.

O’Rourke is at his best when, like Franken, he isn’t going for the punchline, per-se, but rather sounding out his argument in meaningful—if flippant—way. Whether he’s right or wrong isn’t necessarily a debate for the book review; Franken has too much faith in government, and O’Rourke has too much faith in self-governance, and wherever the twain shall meet is a source of conflict. Needless to say, O’Rourke is bright, relatively amusing (especially during pieces when he’s not being overtly political—e.g. his transplanted magazine article about cars), full of genuinely good points about small government, and a talented writer in his own right. It’s easy to see why he’s become a part of the cultural landscape (he’s a frequent contributer to many magazines, a fixture on NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me…, &c.), though he’s likely put better compendia than Don’t Vote.

Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race by Jon Stewart et al

Think back to the heady days of 2004-2005, when the entire country was embroiled in (pre- and post-) election politics, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart had suddenly become an important political and cultural entity, due in no small part to Stewart’s very public flogging of Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on Crossfire. Stewart and Colbert’s recent Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear drew just under a quarter-million attendees, so one can hardly say that the entity has diminished in the intervening years, but there was something particularly novel about Jon Stewart et al. at that point that made their leap from TV to print easy and popular. America (The Book) was a wild success, and so it should have been: it was a well-executed parody of a children’s American history textbook, pointedly satirical and wickedly funny.

Five years later, the same crew (more or less) gives us Earth (The Book), evidently a scaled-up version of the same concept, written as a communique to an alien race that stumbles onto our planet long after we’ve obliterated ourselves.

One cannot talk about satirical works of this sort without inevitably mentioning The Onion, or more specifically its books like Our Dumb World. The latter is more free with its tone, and also has higher production values—I noticed no fewer than two typos in Earth (The Book), which I suppose sounds pedantic until you remember that it’s only 256 pages and most of them are pictures. What’s more, Our Dumb World knew its purpose—i.e. a satirical atlas—and to some extent, so did America (The Book)—i.e. a satirical social studies textbook—but Earth (The Book) is suddenly a book not directly satirizing a known form, and therefore its execution is somewhat more vague and correspondingly less funny. Covering topics from continents to human sexuality to television, the book reminds me of a pinball machine, loud and noisy with bright flashes and distracting noises and so much apparently unrelated sensory output that it prevents you from watching the ball itself; one wouldn’t imagine a lack of focus to be a killer problem in a slapstick comedy book, but such is the case.

Part of the issue may be that its authors forget how smart they really are. Earth (The Book) is a discontinuous series of vignettes, covering disparate topics, and there didn’t seem to be much drive for consistency: some humor is low-brow, some is up to Daily Show standards, and some simply isn’t very funny. Nor is the narrator represented reliably; sometimes he’s perched on a soapbox, sometimes he’s skewering himself, and sometimes he’s replaced himself with Photoshopped images. Perhaps the problem simply stems from the fact that these are Daily Show writers, and the show is a largely political show, and so the pairing worked well in the first book, but led to a sloppy mess in the sequel. I’m not particularly funny, myself, and I sympathize: being told to write a book about everything on Earth that is consistently funny—and not just funny, but funny to a standard which people have come to expect from The Daily Show or its imprimatur—is not simply daunting, but probably impossible. The book could have used a narrowing of its scope, in the same way that The Onion so successfully writes relatively specific books using specific forms.

I appear to be savaging Earth (The Book), which I may be relative to its predecessor; the disparity is apparent for reasons I have already explained. Does this make the book bad or unreadable? Hardly. Commercially, will the book be a success? Yes: Jon Stewart is still a hot commodity and the book features his face and some fraction of his authorship (I think). Is the book fun to read? Sure, though the abundance of caption text can be a bit difficult on old eyes. Does it have the same je ne sais quoi as America (The Book)? I don’t think so, and I don’t believe it will be remembered with quite the same reverence, on the day when such things are documented.

Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me ed. Ben Karlin

You may not realize it, but Ben Karlin has impressive comedy bona fides; he was, for a time, the executive producer of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report before leaving Comedy Central in 2006. He was also a writing lead on the wildly successful America: The Book under the same auspices.

Thing’s I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me is a relatively short anthology, collected/solicited by Karlin, of mostly humorous pieces about romantic breakups. Or it would be, if its writers didn’t so often stray from the assignment, but that’s not such a bad thing.

My general dislike of anthologies is well-documented; I generally find that the end result is inconsistent, and that for every gem, one is forced to endure three or four literary drudgeries. Though calling Things I’ve Learned “literary” is being perhaps a little generous (for the most part, these are humor writers and not writer writers, if that distinction even makes sense and isn’t terribly prejudiced), I find that it tends to follow the same pattern. The introduction by Nick Hornby is as uncommonly good as we might expect from a well-known novelist prefacing a book of comedy dispensers, and the rest vary from surprisingly good to torporously bad.

Since the theme of the book is being dumped, one might expect little more than a list of “Women…. amirite?” jokes in variously juvenile fashion, but Karlin, to his credit, has assembled writers with talent; some of their products are more or less effective in context. Stephen Colbert, perhaps one of the biggest comedy names in the table of contents, has a short piece which is largely a sight gag (so heavily redacted as to let the imagination run wild); Neal Pollack’s story isn’t about a girlfriend at all, but rather a somewhat poignant piece about his cat wrenched back into humor(?) via a detailed retelling of an incident wherein he once accidentally got a volume of his semen on said cat’s fur. Tom McCarthy’s Christian summer camp romance may actually be my favorite, though admittedly it’s much less funny than it is an all-around excellent story turned clever by its readers own sense of retrospection. Dan Savage is the token gay writer who, while his story is certainly memorable, comes off as a bawdier and less talented David Sedaris.

So what do all these disparate stories about the literal or figurative loss of a female of some species at some point in time ultimately have in common? Relationships serve as a litmus test for the personalities of the writers, as foils for their latter-day writing projects. Though written under the auspices of comedy, most of the pieces in Things I’ve Learned… strike me as more melancholy and navel-gazing memories than thigh-slapping yarns. Certainly there are funny things in them, but they’re largely situational, such as Tom McCarthy’s younger self’s fervent, Pentecostal reception of the “Holy Spirit”, or Pollack’s odd and isolated inclusion of the cat/semen joke at the beginning of a long and somewhat sad story about how much loved his pet for reasons entirely unrelated to masturbation. In other words, the humor in this book is mostly of a dry and understated variety, layered along the sides and crevices of general sensationalized autobiography. It works better than I make it sound.

What’s also interesting is the way in which the writers don’t necessarily lean on self-deprecation: there is some of that, but most of it is a sort of retrospective angst, focused at the awkwardness and humiliation and heartbreak that often accompanies one’s first relationship. In Dan Savage’s case, it was a confirmation of the sexual orientation he had suspected for some time; coming from a guy who is now known for dispensing relationship advice (or sometimes simply straight-up sex advice), it seems somehow comforting that his initial woolly and disconcerting early experiences either didn’t break his stride or in fact contributed to his apparent confidence and satisfaction later in life. Or, in Tom McCarthy’s story, the tendency toward miscommunication, however highly stylized, cannot be ignored: though Tom the character is barely a teenager, his poor decision to make assumptions about his beloved’s motivations is a common thread throughout relationships of all ages, and whether or not Tom really did rediscover these letters in his 40s and realize what a fool he’d been, the effect is still worthy of a Hornby novel.

When you begin to realize these things, you’ll also come to understand that the book’s title, Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me is not necessarily a joke at all. In many of the stories (excluding those whose intent is clearly and solely comedic), the focal point is a life lesson which narrative simply happens to be funny.

Some highlights:

42. Arianna Huffington

Charges: HuffPo’s health coverage is like a horny chimp with a switch blade: dumb and dangerous. Arrianna’s “Wellness Editor” holds a “PhD” in homeopathy, the fake science of diluting medicine in water to increase its healing power—the higher the dilution, the more potent. In fact, she and other homeopathic quacks sell “medicine,” which is indistinguishable from Evian. Last summer, Arianna’s “internet newspaper” advised people to protect themselves from swine flu with a deep-cleansing enema. Seriously. Every woo-age celebrity with a vaccination conspiracy or snake oil remedy and a laptop is given column space at HuffPo. It hurts to read Dan Akroyd speculate about the existence of ghosts; it’s agonizing to read Deepak Chopra’s shoddy metaphysics, and it may actually kill to publish Bill Maher’s Luddite rants. Apparently, the only thing Huffington won’t let her writers do is get paid.

Exhibit A: “When it comes to health and wellness issues, our goal is to provide a diverse forum for a reasoned discussion of issues of interest and importance to our readers.”

Sentence: AIDS, one of Magic Johnson’s pills, Lake Michigan and a crazy straw.

27. Barack Obama

Charges: At the end of his first year as president, Obama’s major accomplishment is still having been elected in the first place. Since then, it’s all been Reaganesque speechifying, Clintonesque triangulation, and Bushian spin. His cabinet is packed with the deregulation-mad bankers who created our recession and then “fixed” it by heaving palettes of cash at their former employers. His penchant for bipartisanship, once a quaint campaign pretense, has become an agenda-hobbling obsession. He buzzed still-edgy New Yorkers with a few airplanes to snap a $300,000 promo pic any kid could’ve photoshopped in five minutes. Obama campaigned for a “robust public option” and importing cheaper drugs, closing Gitmo, ending no-bid contracts and backroom deals with corporate lobbyists—and he was going to do it on CSPAN. But he’s done none of those things, and his policies on extraordinary rendition, illegal wiretapping and state secrets are pure Bush. Socialist? We should be so lucky.

Exhibit A: “The reforms we seek would bring greater competition, choice, savings and inefficiencies to our health care system.”

Sentence: A second term of crazed right-wing abuse.

1. Glenn Beck

Charges: As the Sybil of cable punditry and graduate of the prestigious University of I Don’t Remember, Beck’s bipolar professor routine is hands down the funniest thing on TV. When he gets out the chalkboard and starts drawing trees and playing misspelled word association games with a comically grave demeanor, Beck makes Stephen Colbert look like a piker. The fact that millions of Americans think he knows what he’s talking about, however, is not funny at all. If this simpering boob, blubbering the same old reds-under-the-bed melodrama from the ’50s with a sophomoric Da Vinci Code twist, is the face of the people’s rebellion, sign us up for the empire.

Exhibit A: “This president has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture— I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people.”

Sentence: Drowned in crocodile tears; eaten by crocodile.

The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J. Jacobs

I became a fan of A.J. Jacobs when I read his debut book, The Know-It-All. The idea of reading the entire encyclopedia was a bit preposterous, but overshadowed by the sheer joy of trivia; I never really thought of it as an experiment per se. Things changed a bit with The Year of Living Biblically, which was a genuine life experiment for Jacobs, and one that sometimes put him in awkward positions. If you read my reviews, you’ll find that I enjoyed both, but found the latter somewhat cloying at times; Jacobs has a tendency to profess life-altering revelations or profundities which, if they are true, make him naïve, and if they are false, making him disingenuous.

I confess to being underinformed about the nature of The Guinea Pig Diaries. Rather than being a single, year-long experiment (e.g. living biblically), it’s a series of short experiments. One about outsourcing his life to India I recall as a magazine piece he did for Esquire; another tells a story from 1997 or so, very early in his tenure with the magazine. The pieces in the book seem sequential, however; that is, each successive experiment has the knowledge of the previous experiment, and and one point Jacobs makes reference to a meta-experiment, namely a year of small-scale experiments. I am unsure, therefore, if The Guinea Pig Diaries is a synthesis of recollection and the choicest bits from his meta-experiment, or perhaps nothing more than a collated version of his essays for Esquire with brief codas after each.

Jacobs begins with his experiment to help his young, attractive babysitter find a new boyfriend via online dating websites. Using her supplied photos and input, Jacobs takes over most of the responsibility for fielding emails from prospective suitors. His findings include the typical sort of trash you might find on such websites—ridiculous bootlickers/asskissers, married men unashamedly looking for extramarital fun, and swaggering cowboys—but he is ultimately surprised by the (apparently) genuine neediness of most of the would-be suitors. This, he posits, finally occurs to him because he is now wielding the staggering power of femininity: attractive women can pick and choose their rewards, and he finds this power intoxicating and a little frightening.

Or, consider Jacobs’ experiment with Radical Honesty, in which he attempts to wean himself off white lies. The most fun this essay has is the author’s conversations with the founder of Radical Honesty, who—honestly—counters Jacobs’ protestations about white lies by calling him a manipulative son of a bitch (and so forth). This is the most one-sided of Jacobs’ experiments: armed with the story of a recently-widowed acquaintance, he concludes that Radical Honesty, while interesting in its concepts, is an impractical form of communication. Though Radical Honesty allows “kind of authentic sharing that creates the possibility of love and intimacy” because “lying and protecting your image takes a heavy toll on your health and relationships,” it falls apart because honesty requires not simply the guts to tell the truth (easy) but the guts to hear it (not so easy). The difference between open communication and self-destruction is a universal acknowledgment—Jacobs notes with some concern that the crux of his essay was already covered, if somewhat spastically, in Liar, Liar.

The most well-known of the included essays is Jacobs’ attempt to outsource the drudgework of his life to India, hiring two different companies to handle his work (research for articles, etc.) and his personal life (social secretarial work, basically). This essay is the sort that bothers me most about Jacobs’ writing, however; there seems a disparity between the sort of conclusion we would expect and the conclusion he lets us see. At one point, he writes, he assigned his social secretary to “argue” with his wife with some degree of success, which is an absurd sequence of events that either did not happen as he reported them, or happened only because the participants were aware of the context. If Jacobs’ wife Julie accepted the argument-by-proxy only because she understood its role in Jacobs’ work, does that count as a meaningful result of the “experiment”? I would argue that this essay, like most of Jacobs’ work, comprises a textual (and more cerebral) equivalent to reality television: the premise promises an experiment wherein a—wacky—variable skews the results of his life; during the course of it, he will crack jokes, and in the end he will wax philosophical, but we as readers have no reason to believe that the data was not coerced. Jacobs’, after all, serves as his own editor, splicing the footage for dramatic effect. And the participants, insofar as they know of the experiment, will likely give answered which are informed by that knowledge. The result is far less a work of biography; in fact, it teeters on the edge of becoming a creative biographical fiction, the sort which Dave Eggers has tended to write lately.

If I find the works somewhat perfunctory, perhaps it is because Jacobs’ simply isn’t well-suited to the short form: The Year of Living Biblically, while occasionally insipid, was much more meaningfully tied into Jacobs’ life: he and his wife’s hope for a baby girl (and guilty disappointment at more boys) was one of the truly touching parts of a book made wacky by Hebrew haircuts and self-admitted sanctimony. The essays in The Guinea Pig Diaries, perhaps because they require so much less investment from Jacobs or his wife, seem more impersonal: the author can hold them at arms length, dash out 4500 words, and proceed living a life that doesn’t make his wife want to throttle him. In the meantime, the readers get articles that are more along the lines of Jacobs’ mental_floss contributions: a small, digestible bolus of trivia which, while interesting, does not ask for personal investment or deliver much erudition. These are not bad—I like mental_floss, after all—but I know that Jacobs is capable of so much more.

Last Words: A Memoir by George Carlin

Last Words took about 17 years to write. As the story goes, Carlin commissioned it in 1993 with Tony Hendra, but it wasn’t until Carlin died in 2008 that Hendra finally pulled together all of his recorded conversations, notes, and other materials and cranked out the more or less definitive semiautobiography of George Carlin, and Last Words is that book.

I need hardly explain who George Carlin is or why he is important—if you don’t know, this review will be meaningless to you—but for those of us well-acquainted with his unique and sometimes unpredictable views, Last Words is really quite illuminating, and I was surprised by not only the general quality of its craft, but the depth of its information, as well.

In accordance with the book’s jacket copy, Carlin’s story begins literally at birth, as he provides a few choices about the intersection of his almost-aborted 9-month-old self and his mother Mary’s vagina. For those hoping that the book would incorporate much of Carlin’s uncensored spirit, the very first pages are proof enough that this isn’t a dry, tame eulogy, and that either its content came straight from Carli without overly much manipulation, or Tony Hendra is very good at channeling Carlin.

It may surprise some (though I was vaguely aware) that the blue George Carlin we know and love from the last twenty or so years was not always the George Carlin that was popular or famous. Though Carlin begins by describing the turbulent times of his family, especially vis-a-vis his deadbeat father, the familiar material only begins to emerge when the story arrives at Carlin’s stand-up career. But in those days, Carlin was more or less a family-friendly acting, performing schtick like “The Indian Sergeant” on primetime television and event, yes, to sold-out crowds in live venues. At that time, with a wife and a young child, Carlin was living a comfortable—if boring—life as a comedian.

Soon, however, things began to change, and the world-weary ire for which we tend to know George Carlin arose—but so did a number of years of controversy, on-and-off success, and drug abuse by both he and his wife, Brenda. He gets arrested for obscenity in Milwaukee; he starts in a children’s television show. In some ways, Carlin is remarkably glib about his prolific career and profligate personal life: based on the text alone, you wouldn’t guess that Carlin was one of the most important comics of the past half century.

Initially, it was observational—Carlin decries it as naval-gazing—which predated Seinfield’s “And what’s the deal with XYZ?” schtick by a number of years…. gave birth to it, more accurately. Sometimes it was harmless, like observations about the physical properties of boogers; other times it was more controversial, such as his seminal “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television” from his 1972 album. Especially when it came to language, Carlin was blazing new and important trails: I can remember listening to some of these early bits as a child, and it no doubt helped to spark my interest in language and semantics.

As a simple chronicle of Carlin’s career, it is brief but informative; remember, after all, that this story was most from Carlin’s mouth, and so doesn’t seek to be an exhaustive listing of his engagement or life. What’s far more interesting to me is to see Carlin’ philosophize about how his life influenced his comedy—attributing his love of language to his mother, for instance, or admitting that his yearning to be loved by crowds is a feeling which stretches back to his childhood. Then, too, his eventually shift to a countercultural comic came from somewhere as well, at one point roiling out of Carlin in a career-threatening wave. Carlin’s struggle for both success and self-respect is the meat of the book, and it occupies the most space. Unlike, say, Tracy Austin’s autobiography, Last Words isn’t a facile recollection of random anecdotes, or a feel-good storybook with big print, or a simple cash-grab with writing so dull it render less mortals catatonic….. no Last Words is, as I began this review, surprisingly engaging, remarkably honest, and decidedly Carlinesque.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken

It occurred to me recent that I’ve read and reviewed Al Franken’s 2005 The Truth (With Jokes) three times since the start of this meme (1, 2, 3), but never its predecessor, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, which is arguably an even better book.

Conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly hates Media Matters, a website/organization which mostly just documents lies and distortions of conservatives. It’s important to note that there are really no polemics or extended rants of the Ann Coulter variety—the site is, by and large, either transcripts or video clips of the TV appearance/radio show/etc. in question, usually followed by evidence to the contrary. Given O’Reilly’s penchant for dissembling on-air, it is little wonder that he hates them so much.

I tell you this story largely because Franken’s tack in Lies… is along the same lines. Published in 2003, the book takes some shots at the Bush presidency and its major players, but at least half the book is dedicated to notable conservative talking heads such as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Bernard Goldberg. Usually, his critiques come in the form of examples from their appearances or written works which contain a lie or distortion, followed either by a factual rebuttal, or—even better—a separate instance from the same pundit where they claimed something entirely different. There is an especially good story about “Billo.”

At the very least, Franken is an excellent researcher and compelling debater. On the other hand, there are some cases in which the book falls flat. First, while it’s usually clear when Franken is joking, his tendency to lurch back and forth between the two is both distracting and detracting—sometimes, he blurs the line with a self-described “kidding on the square,” which means joking, but really meaning it. Perhaps Franken simply jokes so much so that the book doesn’t come off as 400+ pages of froth-flecked attacks. He is vicious and thorough, and didn’t want it to turn into a screed, easy though it would have been. Of course, the unmentioned side effect is it gives Franken a lot of wiggle room.

While Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot was Franken’s first major foray in punditry, I feel as though it was Lies… which really propelled him to pseudo-stardom in this regard. It was after this that he hit the radio scene with the dubious Air America Radio and followed up with another successful book and (looking successful now) Senate campaign in Minnesota. It’s doubtful that you’ll be reading Lies… if you are already left-leaning. It’s not so much a scholarly critique as it is a scathing, comedic, and surprisingly accurate lambasting of conservative pundits and conservatism generally. So, in many respects, it’s preaching to the choir here. Still, it’s an enjoyable book and I recommend it.

Brain Droppings by George Carlin

When last we saw a George Carlin book here in A Modest Construct, I was pretty harsh, but I take nothing back: When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops wasn’t a very good book. It was unfortunately indicative of the George Carlin we saw in the few years before his death; gone were the elaborate jokes about language, the puns, the extended structures, the tone that manages to be both irascible and playful at the same time (try it: it’s not easy).

When George Carlin died last year, I made sure to watch a bevy of his old routines (including the classic “7 Words You Can’t Say on Television”), but it wasn’t until just recently that I sat down to re-read Brain Droppings, which, apart from small clips such as the aforementioned, was my first real exposure to the man when I read it in the late 90s. It was this book that really cemented my appreciation of his comedy.

What makes Brain Droppings different in so many ways from Carlin’s recent work is that it has very few extended rants about particular subjects; neither does it have the serious I’m-joking-but-not-really kind of anger that seemed present in When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops. The best parts of this book are the “short takes,” which are extended sections of small jokes, often about language, in the form of epigrams, puns, and one-liners. It’s an unadulterated show of Carlin’s appreciation for the ridiculousness and flexibility of the English language, of meaning, and double-entendre, and it’s a joy to read. Even better, it’s the sort of book that doesn’t require large blocks of time: since each section is short (usually a few pages at most), you can easy leave and come back without worrying about losing the narrative thread.

There’s a good reason this book was on the bestseller list for over almost 40 combined weeks. I think it highlights what was so great about Carlin, even though it lacks the inherent charm of his live comedy performances. What’s more, it’s largely atopical, so it doesn’t seem dated even though it’s now 10 years old. Pick it up and read it: this is what made a comedy legend.