A Load of Hooey
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Bob Odenkirk is a legend in the comedy-writing world, winning Emmys and acclaim for his work on Saturday Night Live, Mr. Show with Bob and David, and many other seminal TV shows. This book, his first, is a spleen-bruisingly funny omnibus that ranges from absurdist monologues ("Martin Luther King, Jr's Worst Speech Ever") to intentionally bad theater ("Hitler Dinner Party: A Play"); from avant-garde fiction ("Obituary for the Creator of Madlibs") to free-verse poetry that's funnier and more powerful than the work of Calvin Trillin, Jewel, and Robert Louis Stevenson combined.
Odenkirk's debut resembles nothing so much as a hilarious new sketch comedy show that's exclusively available as a streaming video for your mind. As Odenkirk himself writes in "The Second Coming of Jesus and Lazarus," it is a book "to be read aloud to yourself in the voice of Bob Newhart."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The first humor collection from comedian Odenkirk is to quote Forrest Gump like a box of chocolates. That is to say, its 34 offerings are small, diverse, and consistently delicious. Whether skewering pretensions or making darker, sometimes political, points, the narrative has the deadpan earnestness of Comedy Central's fake news shows, and the details are blissfully on point. Some standouts include "Martin Luther King's Worst Speech Ever," "Baseball Players' Poems About Sportswriters and Sportswriting," and "So You Want To Get a Tattoo!" More mordant in their humor are "The Phil Spector I Know," which takes the American cult of celebrity to a disturbing extreme, and "I Misspoke," in which a political candidate with heinous views slickly "corrects" the public record. Sprinkled throughout the book, like palate cleansers, are 15 fabricated "Famous Quotations": for example,"Know thyself. Come on. Hurry up. We're waiting. Oh, forget it. Socrates." Readers who know Odenkirk from his role as Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad may not remember his HBO sketch comedy series, The Mr. Show with Bob and David, which was similarly topical and mischievous. His work here is in the same vein whip-smart and laugh-out-loud funny.
