Customer Reviews

May Contain Nuts: A Very Loose Canon of American Humor

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I flipped though it and bought it on a whim. It is the best thing I have ever done for myself. This book is amazing!!! It's not just wonderful because it is a great pick-me-up... but it's also brilliant in the writing. Many of the things could be performance pieces or hit a wide audiance. Just read it you won't go wrong! Highly recommended

I was thrilled to be a contributor to this great humor collection. But I was even more excited to read the whole darn book. With a wide range of topics and styles, "May Contain Nuts" is the perfect addition to anyone's bathroom reading shelf. And it even has some light satire directed at George W. Bush including my piece "And What's with That Round Ball?" If you enjoy that one, check out my new book "My Friend W" for more of the same.

Since three of the five reviews that Amazon currently features about this humor collection are written by its contributors, one might wonder if this compendium is a clunker, but that is most definitely not the case. In fact, this is a laugh-out-loud collection of great pieces, including illustrated gags as well as first-rate essays, commentary and satire.

I picked this up as part of a "book binge" following the recent Christmas holiday, which was unremarkable (thank God) but tiring, what with all of the food preparation, obligatory family gigs and tiresome office parties. It was definitely time for some laughs to lighten my mood and get me prepped for the "back to business" days ahead. May Contain Nuts did just the trick. It had me laughing on the subway, right along with the motley crew of screaming kids, ranting preachers, bad musicians and other lunatics that haunt the place. And, unlike other pastimes we could all name, this book offers a clean and relatively safe way to blow off some steam, the only danger being the potential to die laughing.

I highly recommend this collection and the other entries in the Mirth of a Nation series.

With essays from nearly 70 of our country's greatest humorists, including this humble reviewer, May Contain Nuts is, quite simply, the funniest book I have written for all year. I say this confidently, not only knowing that it is the only book I have written for, but because I have also actually read it. And within its soft yet satisfying covers I found funny stuff from all your well-known, thoroughbred, New Yorker-published humor writers, like P.J. O'Rourke, Andrew Barlow and Patty Marx, and also those mangy yet endearing unknown writers like yours truly. It's like one of those big bags of Jelly Bellies, packed with exotic, mouth-watering flavors, along with some very interesting flavors you'd like to try again and then decide if you like them, and then some where you wonder, whoa, what was THAT? This is book you will love, even if you didn't write anything in it.

and one actual stud. (See centerfold, page 228/229.]

Hello, readers! Under increasing pressure to be all things to all people, this new volume of Mirth of a Nation provides customized tables of contents so that each reader may hone in on those pieces most likely to suit his or her individual needs. One example is TV Guidance: We all know that, in their spare time, readers watch television. What you might not know, is that many writers in May Contain Nuts, in their spare time, write for television. In an effort to compete in the marketplace where everything is vying for your attention and dollars, the book provides a sort of TV Guide to its contents (albeit, only one short day's "viewing," as it were, of the 460 pages). Readers can now multitask, spending the "prime time" of our lives reading/watching a book/the television. Or, you may think of this as our friends here at amazon.com do so nicely, "if you liked [fill-in], then you'll like [fill-in]"). In other words, if you enjoyed this television program, surely you'll enjoy another piece of writing in this book by its creative genius or part-time staff writer.
You don't even need to check your local listings for times. An asterisk denotes stardom and the fact that the May Contain Nuts contributor is acting in, rather than writing for, a given program.

[TV Program / writer's name / another piece by that author in May Contain Nuts]

Mork and Mindy/David Misch / Alumni Notes
Sabrina, the Teenage Witch/Nancy Cohen/The Bitter End (My Will)
Girls Behaving Badly/Steve Altes */centerfold
Ed/Michael Ian Black* /How to Meet People More Famous Than You
Tonight's Movie: The Devil's Own/Steve Altes 1 * /centerfold
Double Feature: The Shadow Conspiracy/Steve Altes 2* /centerfold
Mad TV/Brian Frazer/My Bible
TNT's "MonsterVision"/Joe Bob Briggs*, your host/ Forever Dale
The West Wing/Steve Altes 3* /centerfold
Rugrats /Patty Marx/Review
Seinfeld/Peter Mehlman /What I Bring to the Podium
Seinfeld/Marc Jaffe/UN Monthly Bulletin
I Love the 70s/Michael Ian Black*/VH1 Hate Mail
VH1's Rock of Ages/Henry Alford/Operation Enduring Fashion
Late Night with David Letterman/Jill A. Cohen or Bill Scheft or Stephen Sherrill / Sister Goddess Ruby or More Sins of the Fathers or The Odyssey
Saturday Night Live/Patty Marx or Jeff Ward or Mark O'Donnell /Lost Cat or New on DVD or The Narcissos
Late Late Show with Craig Kilbourne/Kurt Luchs/Editorial
Budweiser commercial /Steve Altes 4* /centerfold

footnotes
1 Mr. Altes plays Brad Pitt's stand in; there are, according to the author, women in this country for whom this fact is an aphrodisiac.
2 Mr. Altes is the one who shot Charlie Sheen.
3 Mr. Altes is the one who saved Martin Sheen from being shot.
4 Mr. Altes notes that this has paid more bills than humor writing ever will.

There are also special interest tables of contents for gourmands, politicos, Googlers, and belle lettrists, as well as a very lovely recipe for nutcase brittle, which is, as food writers like to say, addictive.

I actually bought this book for a single article (Judith Podell's "Blues For Advanced Beginners"), but aside from her piece, as I browse through the rest of the book, I have not found one item so far that even got me to snicker or smile.
Either the American comedy writers of today have totally lost their sense of humor, or are trying to be too high brow and pseudo-intellectual, or I am getting too old and insensitive.
In any case, I will soon pawn this book at my local used book store...

Buy this book! Now! Don't wait another moment. I'm not just saying that because I have a tiny humor piece in this book. I'm not just saying that because I appear naked on pages 228-229. I'm not just saying that because John Warner's faux New York Times Book Section review of his first date is the funniest thing ever written. I'm saying that because I'm hungry. Seriously, I'm starving, man. Writers make jack-squat. For every book sold, I get a penny. If a thousand sell, that's $10 to Domino's and a pizza to me. Help a dude out. Buy this book!

Steve Altes