Customer Reviews

2007-Eleven: And Other American Comedies

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you want a good laugh, without the smut of some comic writer's, you should buy this book. The various short stories are to the point and extremely well written. You will especially love Martha Stewart's plan for the Last Supper. It was a scream!

The piece "Glengarry Glen Plaid" is excerpts from the "Land Ho!" catalog as if written by David Mamet. The tone is absolutely perfect, possibly my favorite short piece of writing. The rest of the book is very hit and miss, unfortunately, although I suspect some of the problem is that the rest of it hasn't aged well.

This book is obscenely unfunny. Unfunny of the magnitude only people who get paid professionally could attain. Given, as Amazon had put it, these two fellows' credentials, one would have assumed at least a ModernHumorist.com (another unfunny collection) level of unfunniness. But this beats MH to a bloody pulp. The humour isn't even puerile--at least that would've given it some bit--as it is now, it sits somewhere between the precociousness of Calvin Trillin's cloying self-deprecation and a toilet. It's, well, completely not funny--it couldn't have taken the authors more than a couple of hours and a series of first drafts to come up with this material. And the fact that the publisher deemed this to be market-ready is an insult to the general public's intelligence. For humour--try the Anthology that was just released about a year ago--Mirth of a Nation. In it, you will find a great many authors--Sandra Tsing Loh, David Sedaris, Josh Kornbluth, David Rakoff, and others who actually generate humour. The only thing funny about this book is the sad fact that I purchased it.