The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes I am no stranger to McSweeney’s publications. I’ve previously reviewed Mountain Man Dance Moves and Created In Darkness By Troubled Americans; I’ve also got a subscription to McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, visit the website regularly, and have read numerous authors from the McSweeney’s label. Needless to say, I have at least a passing familiarity with the content and style of McSweeney’s publications.
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them 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.
Brain Droppings 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).
It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Buffalo Beast, a scathing satirical people, has finally published their annual “50 Most Loathsome People In America” article for 2008.
As always, here are three of my favorites, and a link to the full article.
35. Dina Lohan
Charges: Fame isn’t the only thing that screws up child stars; it starts with self-obsessed, psychopathic parents living out their failed ambitions through their hapless offspring (Dina has been telling false stories of her days as a Rockette and Broadway actress for years). Her college-aged daughter may be a rehab veteran and serial drunk driver, but that’s no reason for mom not to televise the warping of daughter number two, a pre-rhinoplasty 14-year-old with no discernible talent or personality who calls the absent Lindsay her “role model,” and an 11-year-old boy whose future mugshot will no doubt become iconic. You may think your parents sucked, but at least they didn’t do it on TV.
Exhibit A: Rarely has a person’s life been so succinctly synopsized by real events as when Lohan’s house caught fire with her minor children alone inside while she was busy accepting—no shit—a “Mother of the Year” award.
Sentence: Age, ugliness, poverty, obscurity.
31. Stephenie Meyer
Charges: She’s the unforgivably perky Mormon mom who wrote the Twilight Series of books, currently draining IQ points from Western Civilization. This silly wank-off vampire fantasy for teenage girls has been embraced by legions of sad, middle-aged women who fight for access to their daughters’ sticky copies of the books. It’s an embarrassing spectacle for all Americans who aren’t actively participating in it. Meyer admits she can’t handle the better class of vampires and has never watched a whole vampire movie, even the more anemic kind: “I’ve seen little pieces of Interview with a Vampire when it was on TV, but I kind of always go YUCK! I don’t watch R-rated movies, so that really cuts down on a lot of the horror. And I think I’ve seen a couple of pieces of The Lost Boys, which my husband liked, and he wanted me to watch it once, but I was like, ‘It’s creepy!’”
Exhibit A: The hit movie version of Twilight, featuring Meyer’s dreary characters, a tiresome teenage girl and the pathetic “vegetarian” vampire who loves her, mooning around on first base for two hours and giving vampires everywhere a bad name.
Sentence: Meyer encounters a non-vegetarian vampire, who kills her immediately and gruesomely in front of an appreciative audience of horror film fans.
17. Rod Blagojevich
Charges: Some things are worse than being bald—Blagojevic [sic] should have given that senate seat to John Edwards’s barber. A sad truth about Blago is that he’s not really in trouble for corruption, abuse of power or favor-trading, all of which are routines practices in just about every elected official’s office across the nation; he’s in trouble for being so damn rude about it, and for not being smart enough to realize what “appreciation” means to more careful favor-traders.
Exhibit A: “[O]ur recommendation is fire all those fucking people, get ‘em the fuck out of there and get us some editorial support.”
Sentence: Flesh removed a pound at a time and used as topping on deep dish pizza, which he is force-fed while his wife spews obscenities at him and Eugene Robinson writes scathing editorials about it.
The Truth (With Jokes) I read this book once in 2005 when it came out, and then again in 2006.
As this is my third time reading The Truth (With Jokes) since this meme began, it holds a record (as of now) as my most frequently-read book in the 52 Books in 52 Weeks meme. Why read it a third time? Well, if it wasn’t obvious enough, the recent election had something to do with it. I remembered Franken’s last chapter, modeled as a letter to his eventual grandchildren, about the 2008 election (the book was written in 2005) and how it represented a tipping point in the way the United States did business—read: the conservatives were out, the liberals were in, and everybody lived happily ever after.