The Follies of Richard Wadsworth
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A dark, bizarre comedy where teachers push boundaries into preposterous places
The Follies of Richard Wadsworth showcases Nick Maandag’s signature blend of deadpan satire and exceedingly unexpected plot twists. In “Night School,” a Modern Managerial Business Administration and Operational Leadership class goes awry when a fire alarm brings the Chief to school and he decides to stick around to teach the students a thing or two about leadership—and discipline. “The Follies of Richard Wadsworth” follows the title character, a professor of philosophy, as he begins work as a contract instructor at yet another university. When Wadsworth finds himself smoking reefer at his student’s party and discovers she works at a rub ’n’ tug, an off-kilter plan is hatched. And in “The Disciple,” a yarn about a coed Buddhist monastery, Brother Bananas, the resident gorilla, isn’t the only one having difficulty keeping his lust tucked safely under his robe.
In Maandag’s hands—hands that love to toy with morally ambiguous characters and flirt with absurdity—troubled men make poor decisions, unlikable characters gain our sympathies through their very haplessness, and riotous laughs ensue.
Maandag has achieved cult acclaim through his self-published and micro-published comics, and The Follies of Richard Wadsworth is his debut book. His mechanical, affectless characters and economical artwork efficiently deliver cringes, heightening the awkward silence and stillness of his hilarious comics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maandag (The Libertarian) showcases his excellent deadpan, cringe-inducing humor in this hilariously unsettling collection of three short stories. Using a spare line and a minimum of expressiveness, he repeatedly skewers the self-important, the self-righteous, and the self-absorbed. In the title story, Wadsworth is a buffoonish philosophy professor whose baser instincts lead to increasingly poor and absurd decisions (with some mistaken identity mishaps along the way). In "Night School," an absurdly byzantine business class veers into madness when a visiting fire chief adds his own deranged input on leadership and discipline. A monastery is the site of "The Disciple," wherein lust-crazed monks try to find loopholes for their desires while a monkey makes fools of them all. Maandag's iron-clad commitment to each story's setup is essential to how uncomfortably funny they become as he layers on absurdist elements, and the occasional surprise visual gags are effective (such as when Wadsworth starts climbing a wall like Spider-Man). This painfully funny book will resonate with anyone coping with arbitrary, pompous authority figures. Correction: An earlier version of this review misspelled the Nick Maandag's last name.
