Tag humor

This Morning

Dusty 1 Comment

This morning, I feel a bit like ranting. About this:

April Fool’s!

You can stop looking for the gag: there isn’t one. I mean what I said: I feel like ranting about the tooth-grindingly annoying “tradition” of April Fool’s Day. I hate this goddamn “holiday” and everything about it.

First of all, I hate practical jokes. I hate pranks, I hate stunts, I hate making people look and feel stupid and then laughing about it. There’s a scale, of course, and there are plenty of harmless pranks and stunts; I’ve been known to jump out and scare people, and also to give gag gifts, and to trick people into believing something that isn’t true; for years I had the word “gullible” written on an index card stuck to my classroom ceiling and I would tell students it was written up there just so they would think they caught the gag, and then I would get up on a desk and pull down the card and show it to them. But see, the difference is that that was so absurd that it didn’t make the “sucker” feel like a sucker: it made me look like a crazy person. That kind of joke I have no problem with.

But the kind of joke where the punchline is “You should have seen the look on your face! BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAaaaaa.” Not my kind of thing. Which leaves me out of the April Fool’s fun. Alas. I don’t get to victimize my friends and coworkers for the sake of a cheap laugh. I don’t get to practice my mendacity (Sorry, it was a vocabulary word last week) by keeping a straight face while I tell everyone that I need a new pancreas or I’m quitting to go raise sloths in Costa Rica. (Believe me, if I ever say that, it will be because it is true.) Again, if the setup is elaborate enough to make the humor more about the lengths the pranker went to to pull the prank, then the laughs are directed at the pranker, not the victim, and that’s fine and generally pretty funny. But otherwise, the hell with April Fool’s Day.

Even the name is bad. Not just the holiday name, but “practical joke.” What the hell does that even mean? It’s a joke with a more real-world application than those abstract Knock Knock numbers? It’s not quite a joke, but almost — “That was practically funny, Irv!” I hate that we use phrases that we don’t even understand. Like April Fool’s: why is it even a day? Where does it come from, this idea that April 1 is the day to fuck with people? WE DON’T EVEN KNOW!  Yet somehow, doing something that on any other day would get you punched, on this day, as long as you say the magic phrase “April Fool’s,” then it’s all fine. Of course, since everyone knows about April Fool’s Day, what you’re really trying to do is prove that someone never looks at a calendar.

People get hurt on this day. Pranks go wrong, people pull tricks they don’t think through, like the “classic” I’m-Pregnant!-No-I’m-Not,-April-Fool’s! gag, which is actually terrible for people who are trying to have children, or who have faced miscarriages or lost their children. Funny shit, Brenda. People go out of their way to comfort those facing a fake loss, or to offer help to those in fake trouble; people run around panicked because they’ve been told that something terrible has happened, their car has been towed, their house has burned down, whatever. And then we laugh, and say, “You fool! You believed my lies? Ha ha, joke’s on you!”

I think we should rename the holiday April Fuck You, and just suckerpunch people randomly. If we’re going to be assholes, let’s get it out in the open.

I’m going to start with the first person who pranks me.

No, of course I won’t! April Fool’s!

Go on. Try it.

Book Review: Noir by Christopher Moore

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(Been a while, I know. Even with my avowed intentions to use this blog to talk about my experiences trying to become a published writer. I didn’t want to sound like I was kvetching —  so instead, I haven’t been posting.

But I got this ARC of Christopher Moore’s newest novel, and I could not think of a better way to come back into my book reviews, at the very least. So here it is.)

Image may contain: 1 person, smiling

The product model is my birb Duncan.

 

Noir

by Christopher Moore

Trouble walked in, shaped like a dame.

Also shaped like a black mamba. (Though he didn’t walk in.)

Also shaped like an alien straight from the crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. (He didn’t walk in, either. Also might not be a he. I mean, probably not, really.)

Also shaped like the usual suspects from a Christopher Moore novel: smartasses and dumbasses, goons and gadflies, men in drag and women in drag and a venerated Chinese uncle who runs an opium den and has a most unfortunate nickname. (It sort of translates to “cat lover.” In a non-traditional sense.)

The trouble? Noir. In San Francisco, in 1947, and it all comes down on Sammy Two-Toes and his friends and allies, and enemies and victims, and especially on that rotten little foul-mouthed kid that keeps waking Sammy up.

Hate that kid.

But I love him, too. And I loved this book.

It is hilarious: I don’t know of anyone else since Douglas Adams who writes books that can make me laugh out loud, hard enough that I have to put the book down, but Christopher Moore can do it, and he has done it again; from the description of the manly scream on the first page, to the black mamba giving a raspberry to the guy he bit on one of the last pages (Not THE last page; the book ends with one of those wrap-ups describing how everything falls out for all of the characters, and no spoilers here –well, not big ones.), I laughed all the way through this book. There are some fantastic zingers, some absolutely glorious descriptions – my favorite is the one of the whorehouse madame in her tight green dress and flaming red hair described as looking “like a tube of red paint that someone squeezed hard in the middle,” because my God, that is just incredible – and some utterly delicious dialogue, particularly when the characters get into their snappy 1940’s noir patter, which I doubt that anyone writing today could do as well as Moore can. In the afterword, he describes his own book as a cross between Damon Runyan and Bugs Bunny, and I think that’s perfect, too. There is also some slapstick, some goofy sex jokes, a bit of gross humor, as there usually is; because that’s Christopher Moore, too.

And then there is the love story (Remember that dame who walked in and brought trouble? That’s the one). It is wonderfully sweet and romantic, and also a little sad; and for me it elevated this hilarious book into something that I would recommend to anyone who doesn’t mind a little filth in their fun; it’s not the whole plot, as of course there is the wacky story line that I will leave to be discovered, but there is also a Cannery Row sort of story about the boys, the ones who live right on the edge of the skids, but who hang on, mostly because they hang together; on some level this is their story, and it’s a good one. I was rooting for them the whole way. And once again, I don’t want to spoil anything – but at least one of these plot lines turns out all right, which made me walk away with a smile, even after the laughs stopped.

This is a great book. You should read it.

Book Review: How to Ruin Everything

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How to Ruin Everything

by George Watsky

 

Well, I hate to say this, because I liked this book, but it’s a lie. Watsky completely deceived me.

This didn’t show me how to ruin everything.

It did show me that George Watsky is a remarkable essayist. He is a humorist in pieces like Tusk, about smuggling a narwhal’s tusk into the U.S. from Canada (I don’t know why we’re building a wall along the Mexican border when there are over 5,000 miles of Canadian border that someone can just walk right through carrying a narwhal tusk! Sad!), and the excellent Good Hook, in which he compares a fly-fishing trip to watching a middle-aged man try to join the Mile-High club with a pneumatically pulchritudinous seatmate who is not his wife. Watsky is profoundly personal, almost uncomfortably so, when he writes about his experiences with a seizure disorder in What Year Is It? and about his father’s connection to the San Francisco Giants in Crying & Baseball. And then, in essays like Three Stories, about the run-down house where he lived with oft-appalling roommates during college, and with Concert Tickets, about tripping on mushrooms, Watsky is me.

Except he’s a better writer.

Honestly, I don’t know how to feel about this book. It’s not perfect: there were some essays I really didn’t see the point of; which may have been the point, of course, but that still left me shrugging my shoulders and souring my mouth, thinking, “Well, what now?” When the same book has these great insights and fascinating stories, why exactly am I reading about Pauly Shore? But then, Watsky is not me: my ideas of what an essay should look like or be about are not his. But the writing is so very good, and the essays that did work for me worked so astonishingly well, that the ones that didn’t work for me generally had me questioning, not what was wrong with the essay or the author, but what was wrong with me. But I’m almost certainly overthinking it.

I guess that’s how to ruin everything.

It’s a fun book, with some ice-water revelations and eye-melting poignant moments, and really splendid writing, detailed and smooth and casually lyrical. I’m going to add Watsky to my list of essayists whose work I will always check for when I hit the bookstores. Since my list includes two men who are no longer in this world (David Rakoff and David Foster Wallace), I’m happy to get a new guy into the rotation.

Batter up!

Redshirts Review

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Redshirts

by John Scalzi

When I bought this book, which is loudly proclaimed on its cover as a NYT bestseller that is a joy to read, with gushing blurbs from two authors I respect quite a lot (Joe Hill and Patrick Rothfuss), I was excited; but the clerk who sold it to me said something that cooled my ardor a little. “Yeah, I didn’t love this as much as everyone else did. I don’t really know why.” As I had been unaware that there was such a lot of buzz about this book, I was a bit puzzled by the comment; but now that I have read it, I completely agree.

I didn’t love this as much as everyone else did.

There’s something about John Scalzi’s writing that doesn’t speak to me. I don’t know what it is. I’ve read a book of his non-fiction, excerpts from his blog; and now I’ve read this Star Trek-themed novel; and I didn’t love either one. I feel like Scalzi is similar to what I’ve encountered in a lot of science fiction writers: their ideas are brilliant, but their prose leaves something to be desired. It makes for disappointing reading experiences, because I get excited about the book based on the concept, but then reading it leaves me a bit cold. Though it is entirely possible that this is my own subjective response, and not something that anyone else would experience. On the other hand: there are some real holes in the plot of this one, and even the short pieces at the end, the three codas that come after the main novel, don’t really spackle those holes in very well.

The idea behind this book is great. For those who know Star Trek, I don’t even need to explain it: the book is written from the point of view of the Redshirts. For those who don’t know the original Star Trek series, I wouldn’t recommend the book; it makes far too many inside jokes and references for those not in the know (And maybe, considering how much we nerds love a good reference, that’s really the appeal of the book.). But essentially, imagine you were a low-ranking officer on a starship sailing grandly through the universe, going where no man has ever gone before, and you realized that every time the command crew went down to a planet’s surface, or over to a ship that had sent out a distress call, somebody died: and it was always, always, somebody like you. The low-ranking officer. The captain and First Officer, the head of engineering and the ship’s doctor – they always went on the away missions, always got in danger, sometimes got hurt; but they never died. It was always somebody else that caught the laser blast or the alien monster attack or stood too close to the explosion. Once you realized that, what would you do? And if you were assigned to the ship that had this record of chewing up and swallowing people just like you – how would you handle it?

That’s a great set up. And the first half of the book, while the main characters are figuring it out while trying to stay alive, really is hilarious. It’s when they figure out the answer that this book lost me. The last half of the book, when they find a way to solve the problem and their own lives, just kept going downhill. There are some funny moments, particularly when crew members meet their own doppelgangers from another universe, but the basic concept really didn’t work. It’s too unnecessarily complicated: the book is clearly, obviously a reference to Star Trek, and Scalzi goes away from that, connecting it to a different fictional universe based on Star Trek but not Star Trek. That was a mistake. The way the Redshirts get their way was too deus ex machina for me, even though that’s the point of it; I would have preferred an actually clever solution, and I didn’t think that was it. And then the protagonist’s final realization of the layers of truth and fiction in his universe was far too precious for me. I feel like Scalzi was a stage magician waving his hands to distract me from seeing how the trick worked – but really, it wasn’t that great a trick. The same went for the codas, which were not as clever as I think they were intended to be, and just ended up annoying me more than the book itself did.

So I don’t know if it was just this book, which suffered from being an idea that is brilliant but probably too difficult to pull off well; or if it’s John Scalzi’s writing; or if it’s just me. At any rate, I didn’t think much of it.

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

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Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

by Patton Oswalt

 

I can’t tell you how happy I was to unwrap this gift from my wife: not only am I a tremendous Patton Oswalt fan; not only have I been reading bad books lately; but it was Jolabokaflod, the Icelandic “Christmas Book Flood” tradition which we tried out this year – you give each other a book for Christmas Eve and then spend the rest of the evening reading. Okay, I waited until Christmas Day to read most of it, and finished it on Boxing Day – but this was an excellent present to start off the Christmas gifts with, and an excellent book to read.

In some ways, it reads like Oswalt’s standup: it’s eclectic and unexpected, shifting subject and pace and even genre with no notice at all: you read the prologue, and then the first piece, which is a personal essay about Oswalt’s youth – and then the second piece is a mock-up of movie notes on an imagined zany comedy about an amnesiac getting married. And the first piece is so interesting and insightful and intelligent that it takes you quite a while to realize that the second one is entirely – not. Well, no, it’s still interesting: but now it’s interesting because it’s a joke, not because it is a reflection on the moment when one realizes one is an artist at heart; even though that realization came to Oswalt in an amusing circumstance, the essential concept of the essay is to describe that self-realization, which, like most great insights, slipped away again almost immediately, to return only in fragments spread out over years –and, I hope, truly recovered for Oswalt in this writing.

Because Patton Oswalt is an artist, a comic artist. This book has humor in every way it is possible to have humor: it has over-the-top toilet humor (The amnesiac bride piece has it all – drunkenness, vomit, nudity, dildos falling onto sushi platters – all the classic gags.); it has subtle and ironic humor, often dark and often self-deprecating; it has one-liners and pieces that are all one long set-up for the final punchline. There are visual jokes as well as literate ones. And like any great comic artist, Oswalt has managed to include a number of genuine insights, frequently hidden as jabs thrown at the world and society’s ugliness and stupidity. Because as Oswalt tells us in the title piece – which title comes from a very effective system of dividing the nerd world, into those who prefer zombie stories, versus spaceship stories, versus wasteland stories – he is a wasteland guy, a fan of the Road Warrior: one who would, in his imagination, destroy the world and society, in order to focus on the last remaining survivors and their idealistic quest to keep their own sense of what’s important, even in a world that has gone mad around them. It’s a quest that Oswalt has stuck to, and a torch of reason and compassion that he carries still, and that carries through this book. It was a joy to read it, to laugh along with him, and even more, to think with him.

Divine Misfortune Review

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Divine Misfortune by A. Lee Martinez

I liked this book right from the start. From the very first chapter, when the main human character, Phil, goes looking online — on a divine version of Match.com which is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while — for a god to worship, I knew this was the kind of thing I love to read. Funny and irreverent, but with just enough social criticism to give it some bite, and something to ground the silliness. Oh yeah: this is definitely a book about a slacker luck god who looks like a raccoon in sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt, who crashes in your house and orders pizza with anchovies and invites his god buddies over for a party; but it’s also a book about the callous and self-serving way that people treat faith and religion. It’s a book about the way that religion exploits its own worshipers, as represented by my favorite character, Quetzalcoatl — “Just call me Quick.” It’s a book about how having the right credentials, which often includes religion, can make or break your career. And it says some interesting things about all of those topics, which alone would make it worth reading — because the writing is good, the characters are both fun and genuine, and it’s never too heavy nor too light. But when you include the fact that Martinez makes great use of the concept of a luck god, imagining all of the possible benefits of having luck on your side — you find enough spare change to buy a new microwave; should anyone (Say, the bloodthirsty cultists who worship THAT OTHER god) come by to try to shoot you, their guns will jam and then blow up in their hands; that kind of thing — as well as the ups (and downs) of serving a hideous lord of chaos, and the fact that the book includes a goodly amount of smiting, then this book becomes something not only worth reading, but worth telling other people that they should read, too.

You should read this book. It’s a lot of fun. I haven’t even mentioned most of the things that make it amusing and enjoyable: you should check them out yourself.

Are there flaws in the book? Sure. I don’t think the human characters are developed enough; they’re just “regular folks,” there to give the gods somebody to play with or fight over. The final battle was something of an anti-climax, though it does fit the plot perfectly. And as amusing as the pagan gods are walking around in modern America, I think it’s been done better, by Christopher Moore, Kevin Hearne, Neil Gaiman, probably others.

But this book was, for me, a lucky find. I’d recommend it.
If you liked this book, I would also recommend:
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
The Iron Druid series by Kevin Hearne
Coyote Blue, Dirty Job, Practical Demonkeeping and others by Christopher Moore