Deliriously Happy

July 4, 2011
TV scripter Doyle (The Simpsons) offers this collection of satirical essays and lampoons from the New Yorker, National Lampoon, Esquire, and other publications in which he skewers everything from wedding Web sites and Mark Twain to dating tips and The Flintstones. A rundown of chef's specials allows him to mock turtle soup: "Our special soup tonight is Georgian alligator turtle, prepared and presented in its own shell. The soup is served cold and slimy." Doyle often writes from the POV of offbeat characters, such as film director Demetri Pinot, defending himself against an accusation that his movie Christblood is "a zombie picture with Jesus as an undead killing machine." In "Freezer Madness," Doyle scoops up alternate Ben & Jerry's flavors: "Karamel Marx, Lenin Meringue, Julius and Ethyl Rosenberry." Many of the delightful cartoon illustrations have a clever 1930s clip-art look, reminiscent of prankster products in the old Johnson Smith Co. novelty catalogue. The acknowledgments page gives a nod to six writers who have served as stylistic influence: Woody Allen, Robert Benchley, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Michael O'Donohue, and Kurt Andersen. No matter the subject, Doyle can be trenchant, funny, esoteric, and unpredictable.

October 15, 2011
The Thurber Prize winner struts his stuff. Doyle (Go, Mutants!, 2010, etc.) collects a dizzyingly diverse and consistently hilarious body of short humor pieces originally published in a variety of publications, making a case for the former Simpsons scribe as one of the premier practitioners of the form. Encompassing parody, absurdism, black satire, loopy ephemera and unhinged silliness, the author displays a mastery of varied stylistic approaches and comic voices, from the Pynchonesque t.V. to a bravura approximation of Mark Twain in Huck of Darkness, in which "lost" passages from Huckleberry Finn are re-inserted into the narrative, making the classic's subtextual homosexual content decidedly more emphatic. It's hard to pin a consistent comic philosophy on Doyle's pieces, aside from a Simpsons-like devotion to dismantling the conventions of social and cultural mores with ruthless efficiency. Highlights include an epic wedding invitation tweaking the smug bride's increasingly berserk instructions for those attending her special day; a letter from summer camp that reads like the fever dream of a young G. Gordon Liddy; a surreally pathetic newsletter detailing the continuing trauma and attendant delusions of a romantic breakup; and a savage, dog-centric takedown of memoirists in the manner of James Frey and Augusten Burroughs. Doyle repeatedly employs such devices as absurd lists (pretentious ice cream flavors, ideas for pet stores) and magazine-style questionnaires to help pace the collection and suggest a formal consistency, but the greatest pleasure is the sheer range of tones and subject matter on display. An unpredictable, unfailingly intelligent demonstration of a unique wit given free reign.

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