Customer Reviews

Politically Correct Holiday Stories: For an Enlightened Yuletide Season

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I guess I'm not one who wishes to be politically correct! After just a few lines of each story, I began to get tired of the "politically correctness" of it, except for the first one. Others probably love it, though. I did finish all the stories, just didn't care for them. By the time I got to the l-o-n-g Christmas Carol I really had "had it" ! But then, satire has never been something I loved.

PC Holiday Stories has JF Garner applying his standard palette of ultra-far-left lampooning to the topic of Holiday tales. He tackles (or should I say pokes) such venerable classics as Moore's "The Night Before Christmas," "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer," "Frosty the Snowman" and Dickens' "A Christmas Story," but not enough to do much damage. Garner even seems to break character by criticizing the very position from which he purports to write. Having St. Nick tell the eco-friendly parents in "Twas the Night" to "Get over themselves" was hardly the way a hyper-PC writer would have ended the tale. The stories are flat and almost predictable. The endings are lame and obvious targets of satire skitter by, unpummelled. It's telling that Garner left most of the religious tales alone. WHile one would not expect a satirical look at the doings in Bethlehem (Monty Python covered this quite well) how about "The Little Drummer Boy?" It seems that after his initial success with PC Bedtime stories, Garner is just playing it safe and phoning in his work.

The adaptation of the Scrooge story was especially tiresome and borrowed more that a little language from the original. Characters and situations received wan facelifts. Scrooge's last spirit, for instance was an inarticulate punker (so far so good), that Garner didn't do much with. This comes across less as "homage" than as laziness. Given the plethora of existing Scrooge rip-offs and parodies, Garner's version was rather pale.

Get this for a stocking stuffer if you must, but don't expect it to be the rollicking hit of the season.

I looked forward to this book, because I thought "Politically Correct Bedtime Stories" was so funny. This was disappointing. The Rudolph story was okay, and Frosty was okay too, but all in all, the book was a great step down from "Bedtime Stories." Mr. Garner seems to have lost some of his clever wit, and he spends way too much time on Ebenezer Scrooge. That story turns out dry and extremely dull, I muddled through that one, and because Mr. Garner takes such length with it, it turns out to be half of the book. Not funny this time, Mr. Garner. Sorry.