Customer Reviews

Wry Martinis

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I found a good illustration of Christopher Buckley's sense of humor while reading of one of the ocean crossings that he had taken with his Father. Buckley the Elder routinely sailed an ocean every 5 years or so, and his Son was often part of the crew. All the ship's members had tasks, and on this trip Christopher was in charge of bringing along projects for fun and diversion during the extended voyage. The one I will remember was the model he brought for the group to construct, of course a ship, and for him it could be no other, The Titanic.

His is not low brow cheap shot humor, although you may be surprised by how inept some other Authors are when engaging him in written debate. He writes within this book on a variety of subjects guaranteed to make you laugh, and for those that take themselves, or a given subject too seriously, he will annoy you. Even if the latter group is the one you find yourself in, if only to yourself, you still cannot deny the wit, and the intellect that is behind his thoughts.

So if The Pope appearing on Oprah selling his new book intrigues you, or perhaps Johnnie Cochran writing a letter of recommendation for the squeezed fruit who was his client piques your interest, this read is for you. If the two topics I mention do not suffice, there is always his written feud with Tom Clancy, satire on Star Trek, or perhaps the "How I went 9 G's in an F-16 and Only Threw Up Five Times", there is something here that will cause you great pain in your sides, as he is the cause of pain for his adversaries in their nether regions.

The stories I mentioned are a tiny fraction of what awaits the reader, for I have not touched upon the selling of Lenin's embalmed corpse.

Buckley the Younger is wonderful, or as the Author Tom Wolfe states "Fifty years ago the 3 funniest writers in the English language were named Shaw, Mencken and Muggeridge....today they're named Thompson, O'Rourke, and Christopher Buckley..."

If you have not tried this man's work, this is a great place to start.

Chris Buckley is my favorite author, having written masterful satires like "Thank You for Smoking" and "Little Green Men." This is not a novel, as I was dismayed to learn, but just a collection of Buckley essays. Each is cute and funny, and the set makes for nice, lite, magazine-style reading. The essay about George Bush (Sr.) and martinis is hilarious -- I still refer to an extra-dry martini (just wave the vermouth bottle over the glass, not opening it) as the "George Bush" martini. Get this book if you have read everything else Buckley has written.

Wry Martinis is an easy to read, funny collection of essays. Buckley has a wry wit and his outlook on topics from the old Soviet Union to Fly Fishing will keep you laughing for quite a while. Especially fun is his fax feud with Tom Clancy

I am a Chris Buckley fan who loves his hilarious satire. I would have rated this book a 10, except he filled the last half of the volume with more sobersided essays. These were not as interesting. You finish another funny piece around the middle of the book, manage to stifle your laughter, wipe your eyes and say to yourself, "OK, I'm ready for the next one." Only the next one isn't funny, or even particularly interesting. What would the world be like if Dave Barry, Calvin Trillin, or Fran Lebowitz pulled such a stunt?

The book was worth the price, though, just to read the articles on Buckley's feud with Tom Clancy. You'll have to excuse me now, I've got to get to the library to locate a book that Buckley recommends called "Bassholes", by Ed Weiler.

American conservatives are doomed to suffer in squaredom for a simple reason (besides weak hair): their stance of Permanent Moral Disapproval. Whatever virtues this state may possess, hipness is not one of them. Fred MacMurray may be an admirable paterfamilias and a model of bourgeois rectitude, but he will not win the dance contest on Soul Train.

The Right has a serious fun problem. Like evil runes possessed of a curious power, the words carved on the id of every teenager worth her salt -- sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll -- send conservatives into a howling, medieval fury. The inconvenient fact is that all hipness contains a spice of nihilism, a tiny but flavorful soupcon of who-gives-a-****, that is anathema to the Right. To the degree that conservative writers embrace Cool Style, they simply cease to be conservative. -REVIEW : of "Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing," edited by David Brooks (GARY KAMIYA, Salon)

That statement is, I suppose, fairly typical of how the Left views conservatives, and may in fact be largely true. But it misses two extremely salient points : (1) those who do embrace Cool Style cease to be humorous, after all, if you think it's perfectly fine to engage in wildly varied sexual experimentation, then 99% of the jokes ever told in the history of man, particularly those with sheep in them, no longer have punch lines; (2) no the Right isn't out having this sort of fun, we're home with our wives making jokes about the hipster doofuses that think that such behavior makes them cool. [Recall the hilarious Republican response to Ted Kennedy's 1988 Democratic convention speech, where he used the tagline "Where was George ?" Answer : Home in bed with Barbara, sober.] Humor, particularly satirical humor, by its very nature, requires you to take a pretty jaundiced view of humankind; it practically requires the stance of Permanent Moral Disapproval, which Kamiya finds so offensive. The natural result is that almost all of the humorous political writing in America today is being done by conservatives. The collection that is panned above, for instance, includes an embarrassment of riches, including Joe Queenan, PJ O'Rourke, Andrew Ferguson, and Christopher Buckley.

Wry Martinis meanwhile is a collection of twenty years worth of the writings of Christopher Buckley--an editor at Forbes FYI, regular contributor to the back page of The New Yorker, former speech writer to Vice President Bush, and the son of William F. Buckley. The book contains many funny pieces ranging from travel essays to book reviews. Among the funniest are his NY Times review of Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor, which is so scathing that it provoked a mini-feud between the two. It starts by citing Mark Twain :

Somewhere, if memory serves, Mark Twain said of one of Henry James's books, "Once you put it down, you can't pick it up." "Debt of Honor," the eighth novel in Tom Clancy's oeuvre, is, at 766 pages, a herniating experience.

And things get really ugly thereafter. One of Buckley's favorite devices, especially in his New Yorker bits, is to take one seemingly innocent item out of the news and then spin a comedic scenario around it. Among the factoids that get this treatment :

* 'They both come to my house. We serve them a Martini. And we have an exchange between the two.' -Tom Brokaw in The New York Times, proposing an alternative presidential-debate format

* A group of conservative political operatives is expected to announce today the launching of the Conservative TV Network, a 24-hour pay cable-television channel expected to debut in early 1996. -USA Today

* To save money, airlines in the United States are circulating less fresh air into the cabins of many airplanes. -The New York Times

These brief essays are generally very funny, but even better, the modus operandi set him up to perpetrate a terrific hoax. In Forbes FYI, he started out a piece with a seemingly similar blurb :

It has come to our attention through private channels that the Soviet government is preparing to make a very unusual, indeed unprecedented, offering : the embalmed remains of V. I. Lenin.

The following fabrication proved so successful that the Soviet government was deluged with bids and Peter Jennings reported, and later angrily retracted, the story on ABC News.

These and the many other pieces make for a truly funny collection. It belongs on your shelf, in the midst of the collected works of H. L. Mencken, Tom Wolfe, Andrew Ferguson, and P.J. O'Rourke, and the other equally funny curmudgeons who have so masterfully turned the Human Tragedy into a Human Comedy.

GRADE : A-

I am normally a huge Christopher Buckley fan, and I was excited to get Wry Martinis. I knew it was a collection of (largely) previously published work, but why should that matter? Unfortunately, it turns out to matter a lot. Buckley's magazine pieces would no doubt be funny if you came upon them one at a time in a magazine, just the way Andy Rooney could be funny at the end of a 60 Minutes broadcast. Strung end-to-end, however, these short essays just become irritating. Here's one thing Buckley doesn't like. Here's another. And another. The effect is only slightly more appealing than a six-hour tape of Andy Rooney.

This is such a disappointment. I loved Thank You For Smoking and White House Mess, and this is what you feared when you first heard he was a writer; a snotty rich creep shows his snob wit. With many satire writers, more is less, but he works much better where he doesn't have to be in a hurry to strike his target.

I find the "straight" stories much better than the satire. They show the author to be a most human being with deep feelings and convictions. This will - hopefully - survive. But all the little stories at the beginning of the book will be forgotten before the year is out

Although I truly enjoyed this book, by the time I finished I really had a good sense of East Coast life, especially those who mix in circles where royalty is called by their first names while on a cruise down the Amazon! Some chapters in this collection of essays are laugh-out-loud funny, such as 'Hemlines of History'; others taught me a lot about aircraft and aircraft carriers; still others had me bored and wondering if the essay was supposed to be poking fun at the elite, or written in complete seriousness about a world I know nothing about, nor really care about. Maybe its because I live on the West Coast, and we are more informal, but some of Buckley's concerns and gripes don't seem all that important to me. However, I do recommend this book because it is well written and a wonderful example of the lost art of essay writing.

Good bathroom reading