Customer Reviews

Coyote V. Acme

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

How many things can you say about this book? Until I got around to reading Fight Club, this was easily the strangest book I'd ever read. The title essay is pretty fun (if skewering the conventions of things like legalese makes you laugh; it works for me) but the real humor in the book comes from stretching things to their logical extremes. Where Frazier does that, it's funny. Where he doesn't, it often doesn't quite work (previously mentioned was the Satanist university president, an essay that fails to make sense even in Frazier's cockeyed world view).

So we see the traumatic aftereffects of the cancellation of one of the better-known classic sitcoms, part of La Femme Nikita's tax return, the concerns of a life insurance agency that deals with soap opera characters, and the comparison of a woman's laugh to brandy by firelight (really impossible to explain without reading it). There is also juxtaposition of extreme ideas; We see bank bureaucracy not merely run amok but deliberately driven off the rails. We see a mild-mannered Great Gatsby-ish short story suddenly invaded by a German Panzergruppe. We see the poetry of Don Johnson. We see a Martha Stewart-type character named Elsa disposing of incriminating evidence.

This is an excellent book, but with one caveat: it simply is not going to appeal to everyone, no matter how someone might try to sell it. Mr. Frazier's work here reflects a sense of the surreal more extreme than Monty Python, up in the range of Andy Kaufman or Emo Phillips, and that sort of edgy comedy makes your brain hurt. I like it, though.

Ian Frazier's Coyote v. Acme will not please everyone as the humour is not always accessible but when it clicks, it clicks with a sweet, funny vengence. I did not understand all the humour but could surprisingly even enjoy the whimsy of the essays that were swimming just a little above my head. And each small essay is short enough to either get or not get and then move on to the next one. In a short space of time there should something of great humour for the reader and, often, many things. Because of the rather esoteric style of the humour, the book even stands up to repeated readings, something that is very rare in a book of humour.

I picked us this book after reading Lamentations of the Father: Essays by the same author. That book floored me with its almost 100% hysterical essays. This one was a disappointment. There was a little too much high-brow New Yorker humor that seems to be only for the inside, elite crowd, like the New Yorker cartoons which mostly leave me befuddled. The last three pieces and the piece which is the title of the book were really funny. The rest just didn't cut it. If you can get your hands on those other pieces it's probably better than inversting in the whole book.

If you are having increasing difficulty finding a book, movie or TV show which actually makes you laugh out loud, buy "Coyote vs. Acme." Even the most jaded of readers (me) cannot help but howl at the truly inspired and funny stuff Mr. Frazier includes, page after blessed page.

The book's title is also the title of the funniest included passage, which is an absolute gem. The idea of a product liability suit against Acme corporation in which a choice selection of Wile E. Coyote's numerous graphic encounters with faulty products are relayed in dry and verbose legalese that only enhances the humor value is pure genius. With the exception of those unfamiliar with Mr. Coyote or the concept of product liability suits (both common conditions in Japan), I have yet to encounter anyone who hasn't found that particular passage hilarious.

Unfortunately, few of the other selections are as interesting or entertaining. Most strike me as an observant eccentric's failed lengthy inside jokes enjoyed by a party of one.

Were "Coyote vs. Acme" not included, I'd give this 2 stars, perhaps 1. However, considering the low price of this book (I think I paid pennies for it used), it's certainly worth buying, if only for the title passage.

Mr. Frazier may be hearing from my attorneys soon, as I may have ruptured something laughing at the title story. That alone would be worth the price of the book, but the rest of it, while not always gut-wrenchingly hilarious, should not be read in a hospital corridor.

I first encountered Ian Frazier through "Dating Your Mom," which is one of the funniest books I've ever read. Then I read "Great Plains" and "Family," both of which are excellent but rather melancholy books. I don't know if it's me or him, but reading "Coyote vs. Acme" I couldn't help thinking that Frazier wasn't really laughing most of the time, so I wasn't laughing much either. The title story and a couple of others were pretty funny, but I would recommend "Dating Your Mom" for more laughs and his other books to correct your overly optimistic view of human nature.

Ian Frazier's work no longer appears in "The New Yorker," which is a great pity to those of us who enjoyed his work there. His later pieces for that magazine are collected here in "Coyote vs. Acme," which is worth purchasing for the title work alone. And although the essays here are somewhat more uneven than those in his earlier collection, "Dating Your Mom" (which I also recommend), "Coyote vs. Acme" is still an excellent sample of Frazier's work.

You have to love the absurd to like this book. Frazier likes to juxtapose unrelated concepts, like a garden party with a blitzkreig. There is one gem of an idea in each essay, and you'll laugh out loud when you get it. On the downside, there is *only* one joke in each essay, and at times the end doesn't come soon enough.

Ian Frazier's new volume casts a bent eye to some of our institutions with a clever turn of phrase and tongue firmly imbedded in cheek. If this comes out sounding like a cross between Dennis Miller and Buddy Hackett, then so be it. These pastiches are actually more closely related to Robert Owen Butler's "Tabloid Dreams", but also have a sense of John Lennon's "In His Own Write" or "A Spaniard in the Works".

From the opening tale about the dissolution of a family (and civilization as we know it) due to the cancellation of a weekly sit-com "Somewhere, invisible pens compute the swirling arithmetic of loss."; through a German invasion of a wedding party "...that smell of ether, camel dung, and boiled cabbage that the German Army carried wherever it went."; and the attorney for the plaintiff, Wile E. Coyote, describing his client's numerous bodily injuies including, but not limited to "flattening of the cranium, displacement of the tongue, reduction of length of legs and upper body, and compression of vertebrea from base of tail to head."; this is a seriously funny and well written look at modern Americana and its attendant symptoms.