Customer Reviews

Winters' Tales: Stories and Observations for the Unusual

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What a wonderful book. You would expect a book by a comedian to be full of laughs (and this one is definitely full of laughs), but there is a serious note to many of the stories; it's the kind of book that puts you into a state where you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Jonathan Winters writes like O. Henry; you never know how his stories will turn out, but you know there will be a twist in the end. These stories beg to be read aloud; I hope that someday a spoken-word version will be released.

These aren't short stories--more like scenarios, or poems in the form of scenarios. Jonathan Winters impersonates children, a baby robin, a migrating duck, a tiger, a lunatic from an asylum on a picnic, a bear cub that becomes a teddy bear, a child going to an asylum, the President of the United States hosting a boring reception, a man attacked by a bear, soldiers, an alcoholic Navaho artist looking to his Medicine Man for a cure, a test pilot, orphans, Santa Claus & a turkey, among others. He has it in for Admiral Byrd--maybe the name, because birds appear often. Each "take" has a twist at the end, more for surprise than irony. His tone is more screwball than bizarre, as if he were trying to bean the reader with a wild pitch. His method is to strew stimulation everywhere, but he also deals with serious subjects--love, war, loss. His mood is plaintive rather than deep, like a kitten crying. He searches for value & finds none except laughter, as if he were Kafka scripting an episode of "The Twilight Zone." If the book gets thin in places, it's because the written word is less effective for a performing artist than the spoken word. Listen to the casette first.

Jonathan Winters is a man known for his humor, not his writing of serious stories. From the content of this book, it will do little to improve his standing in the latter. These stories are deeply disturbing, they reminded me of some of the writings of Ray Bradbury, yet they lack his intensity that somehow softens them.
The most disturbing is "A Well-Kept Secret", about a boy raised by his grandfather and who grows up to be a cross-dressing gay man who performs in a Las Vegas show. He invites his grandfather to Vegas and pretends to be Lilly Long, a female friend of the grandson. When his grandfather arrives, he goes through the actions of "seducing" his grandfather, even kissing him passionately. When his robe catches on a piece of furniture and his manhood is revealed, the grandfather dies of a heart attack.
Most of the other stories were in a similar macabre vein, while I sometimes read such stories and enjoy them for their message, it was hard to complete this book. The story "The Last Day the Circus Came to Town" is a flashback to the old days of the traveling circus and the parade they held from the train station to where they were to hold their performances. In this case, the circus train is hit head-on by a fast-moving freight train and most of the performers and animals are killed or taken down. This book is for the very hard-hearted and there is no humor here.

I have always been a big fan of Jonathan Winters, and it was with some excitement that I ordered this book. Unfortunately , it was one of the few I have ever thrown away. The "stories", as such, are not much more than idle and disconnected ramblings and often if a selection does contain anything to link it, the ending is nonsensical and unsatisfying. The "humor" in the book would only appeal to someone who found illogic a source of mirth. I'm sure if this book had been submitted for sale by an unknown author, it would have gone quickly to the place publishers call the "slush pile."

Don't waste your money on it.

[...]

What this short volume consists of are notions of stories; a setting, some characters, a dash of conflict -- and then a too-quick dart to the end, often with a nonsensical twist ending thrown in for ... well, I don't know what for. Not effect, because it doesn't have much of an effect other than to make me scratch my head and wonder, "What the --?"

If Winters had taken more time to flesh things out, to expand from where he starts so confidently, these could have been much better. His writing has echoes of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, both master craftsmen of short stories, and to take that on a trip through the demented twists and turns that can be found in Winters's performances would have been brilliant. (For example, in one story, a man on his way to a costume party in Beverly Hills dressed as Hitler in a pink Gestapo uniform has his Mercedes break down in the Fairfax district -- a unique premise that has promise. What happens next? Well, he tells us in one sentence what really should have been the rest of the story, the gist of which is that he was beaten up for being dressed like Hitler in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood.)

But I can't review what might have been, only what is, and this is a disappointing collection of stories that Winters seemed to have lost interest in halfway through the writing of each.

jonathan winters is great while watching him
reading him made me feel that his tales were exaggerated and too unbelievable. i quickly put it down