Customer Reviews

Into Hot Air: Another "Novel" by Chris Elliott

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Chris Elliot was great on the old Letterman, brilliant in the shortlived but much loved sitcom Get a Life, and then there was Cabin Boy, the less said the better. And now he's a novelist. He has no shortage of ideas for Into Hot Air which is not laugh out loud funny but has enough of Elliots quirkiness to keep the reader engaged. Elliot can write, and he has enough characters, plot-lines, and jokes for several books. What's missing is seeing Elliot whose physical comedy, facial expressions, and try anything manner is meant for the big or small screen. So while this is nice for Elliot fans, HBO or someone needs to give him another show where his comedic skills are better suited.

Well, I love that the author refers to himself, often, in the book as "that stupid actor in that movie I hate", because that's generally my attitude towards Chris's work. However, I love mountaineering and adventure writing, and so loved the idea of someone poking some well deserved fun at them, that I took a risk with his writing. Mr Elliot can be soooo......silly, way over the top and he sure doesn't fail here (bullfrogs, weird enough on Everest, transforming by popping into Nazi gnomes !?!) Whacky clowning, then he sucker punches this reader with a scene from "The Exorcist", his Grammy sits up in bed, "why you do this Chrissie? Why you do this?" Out of nowhere!! No fanfare, no further reference. Hilarious moments! I was very pleased with this "novel". I tend to read weighty history and science stuff so Mr Elliot provided just the goofy, unpretentious, fast read I needed. I wanted to subtitle it "An Hypoxic Novel" it was so hallucinatory. Mr Elliot - you know much of the lingo, have you climbed? I'm sorry your cerebral edema has yet to resolve. And how is that frostbitten, at least thrice removed nose doing?

Chris Elliot's unique sense of humor is captured perfectly in this hilarious follow up to the equally funny "Shroud of the Thwacker". I'm looking forward to seeing Chris Elliot on the screen again, but his books are doing a great job filling the void.

I've been a fan of Chris Elliot since his show "Get a Life" was on TV so I was excited to see he had written a book since Daddy's Boy. (I missed the release of Shroud of the Twacker) Daddy's Boy was funny. Into Hot Air is not. Not in the least. The nonsense that I loved in Get a Life comes off as being forced and completely unfunny in this book. This book is embarrassing for everyone involved including the reader. Poor Chris. What was he thinking?

the book is good. there was almost no instances that i was not laughing out loud while reading the shroud of the thwacker. this one not so much, but the story itself was pretty engaging. so just good. i hope he does a few more as funny as shroud of the thwacker. also more movies and a talk show. and another sitcom. okay, that's all.

Into Hot Air, Chris Elliott's second "novel" is another dead-on parody of an adventure epic, packed with Elliott's unique brand of humor. The narrative is wildly inventive, the dialogue is cleaver, and Chris (as himself, the leading character) is at his irreverent best. This book is dense with humor, and you just smile and smile as you read. Let's hope he's working on another!

I loved Chris Elliot in Get a Life. I didn't know he was also a talented and creative writer. This novel is just plain funny. Elliott takes a serious, introspective topic - ascending Mount Everest - and turns it into a laugh riot. The story, despite its outlandish plot, flows well. Every page made me laugh on some level of the laugh scale - from guffaw, to chortle, to laugh out loud. Elliott takes us from the genesis of his journey, when he discovers his great-uncle Percy'd diary, who presumably summitted Mouny Everest, through his gathering of a team to climb with him - including a mix of celebrities, each with their own particular role to play on the climb, especially as foils to each other, to the inevitable hazards encountered on the ascent, including some outrageous episodes that could only have been conceived by Elliot's mind. If you read the book now (March of 2008) there is an eerie sense of prophecy in some of the events that unfold. I don't want to give it away, but if you are keeping up with news about Tibet (where Mount Everest is located) you'll know what I mean. If you want to laugh consistently while reading a humor book, pick up (and read) Into Hot Air.

I hope Chris Elliott keeps pursuing fiction. Now that Mark Leyner seems to be making piles of money with popular medical books, Elliott seems to be leading the pack in works that satirize the idea of narrative and place the author at the center of the action.

In this book, Elliott organizes a group of celebrities in climbing Mount Everest, during which they encounter the most ridiculous of narrative plot points, from a quest for a "rhombus" to monster crabs. Ellott, as in "The Shroud of the Thwacker," puts himself front-and-center in the narrative, using the clueless, egotistical jerk persona he's adopted in his comedy, from "Late Night" sketches to his "FDR" spoof to "Get a Life" (in effect, he's borrowed his own character, which is pomo to the max). Underlying the narrative are references to, in the case of "Shroud," time-travel fiction (the great "Time and Again" in particular) and in "Hot Air" the rather obscure episode in which James Stewart thought he had found a Yeti bone. These references demonstrate Elliott's basic intelligence in building his satires.

But what I like most about "Hot Air," even if the humor is sometimes hit-and-miss, is the fact that Elliott takes a conceit and builds a metanarrative that keeps commenting on itself in a fairly sophisticated (at least for me) way. Toward the end, he even admits that he made some stuff up, then attempts to undo his statement to accommodate another plot point. The book uses a slew of post-modern "borrowings," from the familiar actors on the expedition (the actress whose first name is Lauren should be particularly flattered) to the CIA- and Dalai Lama-fueled plot twists at the end. Futhermore, Elliott pulls it all off with a dynamic prose style. I'd like to see him apply his talents to a "memoir."

At once a novel and a parody, INTO HOT AIR mocks epic literary adventure stories and comes from an award-winning comedian who presents the story of a great-uncle's journey and an anonymous package which indicates he might have been the first to climb Everest. High humor and tongue-in-cheek discovery will delight any who regularly read adventure nonfiction, particularly mountain-climbing books, making this an excellent general-interest collection recommendation.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Chris Elliott is hilarious... If you are a fan of his humor, you will love this book.