I keep falling into the same trap: funny bloggers rarely make funny authors. "The Football Fan's Manifesto" by Kissing Suzy Kolber stalwart Mike Tunison is a case in point.
A snarky (what, a blogger who cops a snarky attitude? Get out) take on how to be a fan of an NFL team, Tunison hits the expected notes (pick a team to root for young, never change allegiance ever, hit fans of other teams in the balls with bricks, etc.) and makes sure to shoehorn in the occasional commentary snidely referencing the fact that NFL owners and players give two tugs of a dead dog's dick about their fans so it's all pretty much a waste of time, money and emotional investment anyways.
The book follows the lifetime of an average fan, starting with picking out a favorite team as a child, progressing through learning how to insult fans of other teams, arranging college life around football, how to pick a spouse that won't interfere with being a fan, etc and so on through death (even though, as Al Davis aptly proves, death is no reason to stop being involved with football).
Sections on each team's city and respective fanbases, larded with insults tailored to each are chuckle-worthy, even if the insults are mostly of the "take a word for some genitalia and combine with a meaningless noun to form New Insult #487" stripe. I particularly giggled at the expected gibes against terrible franchises like the Redskins or Raiders. I certainly chuckled out loud a few times here and there.
The problem is, this style of writing makes for an excellent blog post, but not so much for an excellent book. Blog posts tends towards the timely, so taking three minutes to read a complete website post full of sharp jibes about yesterday's game is going to have an impact that reading 300 pages of not-timely slams about an entire league and lifestyle just can't match.
I'd probably have enjoyed this book more if I were the sort of reader who reads multiple books at a time, cherry-picking chapters here and there based on mood. But I'm not; I read one book at a time to make sure I'm as immersed as possible in whatever the author's trying to make me care about. So, by about a third of the way through the book, when the jokes about how bad the Raiders are begin to repeat and Tunison's struggling to find a seventh funny way to describe your average football fan as a drunken, emotionally-stunted manchild with commitment issues towards everything BUT his favorite pigskin squad, well... it grew tiresome.
I'd recommend any of the websites Tunison writes for unreservedly; he's a sharp, funny blogger, at his best when dishing out a few minutes' worth of scathing commentary on current sports happenings. As an author, he needs to find a way to liberate his humor from the specifics of a given football season and go for a more universal theme; after all, calling somebody a "pussybasket" has applications FAR beyond just insulting Packers fans.
