Mr. Funny Pants

November 22, 2010
Brooklyn-based comedian-screenwriter Showalter (The Baxter) offers a witty "comic memoir," in which he has chosen to deconstruct the concept of books with lengthy satires on the front matter and closing pages usually found in books. After "About the Author" and "Aboot the Author (For Canadian Edition)," he follows with "About Bea Arthur." Then he finally gets going with the "Acknowledgments" ("I acknowledge that I am writing a book") and "Preface": "Being that I haven't started to write this book yet, I think it's irresponsible of me to write the preface first." Spewing forth short essays illustrated with gags, doodles, diagrams, and charts, Showalter draws the reader in with strange questions ("Would it be weird if cats were as small as mice?") and self-deprecating spoofing. Much of his humor pivots around convoluted paradoxes, quirky didactic tactics, literal truths, and stating the obvious, such as his "Holiday Recipes": "Gravy. Go to your local supermarket and ask the guy where the canned gravy is." Showalter can be funny, but at times his puns are simply predictable.

December 15, 2010

An occasionally amusing book about how to write a book when you really have nothing to say.

Many comedians seem to land book deals whether they have a book in them or not. As the writer/star of MTV's The State and the cult film Wet Hot American Summer, Showalter, who teaches screenwriting at the NYU Graduate Film School, understands that many of those books have no point to them. He makes such pointlessness the point of this book, which describes the processes of writing it in painstaking, even excruciating detail. For Example: " 'Making Sense': Should this book make sense? Should it be cohesive? Should it have a beginning, middle, and end? Should I connect dots? Should I construct a narrative that is easy and enjoyable for my reader to follow? Or should it be an incoherent mess? I'm still not sure. Gut is telling me that incoherent mess might be my best shot at finishing it." Among the elements in the inevitably incoherent mess are book proposals, diagrams, advice for writing and selling screenplays, dating tips, Scrabble strategy and jokes. Some of the jokes are funny; with more of them, what's funny is that the author pretends to think they're funny or pretends to think the reader will think they're funny. To wit: "A FOR SALE BY OWNER sign is way better than a FOR SALE BY THIEF sign." (Funny.) "Instead of a string quartet what if there was a string bean quartet? How crazy would that be?" (Funny?) In the afterword, he writes, "I fell WAY SHORT of my goal to write a profound and meaningful memoir. On that level I FAILED COMPLETELY. I did however manage to use the word penis over four hundred times." One of them: "There is nothing worse or more terrifying than an intellectually curious penis." (Funny?)

Review-resistant humor--probably just for the fans.

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December 15, 2010
This memoir-of-sorts by the offbeat writer and comedian should, at the very least, get a few readers scratching their heads. Showalter combines Woody Allenlike essays (a parody of an ad for an online university, for example) with episodes from his own life (auditions, his editorship of the college literary magazine), advice for would-be Hollywood screenwriters, brain-teasers, dos and donts of dating, and running commentary on the writing of the book itself. The book is very funnyit begins with the traditional About the Author section, followed by Aboot the Author (for the Canadian edition) and About Bea Arthur, for no particular reasonand in among the jokes and parodies, readers may get the occasional glimpse of Showalter himself, peeking out from behind the wordplay. Fans of Showalters offbeat comedythe movie Wet Hot American Summer, the sketch-comedy series The Statewill very much enjoy this book. All others may be entertained if mystified.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)