Friday, July 31, 2009

Teh Funny: a BTT on Friday

Recent Funny July 30, 2009
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 1:48 am



What’s the funniest book you’ve read recently?


This one's pretty easy. It would absolutely have to be Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman.

One of my fellow string players in orchestra loaned me this one (which reminds me, I've got to give it back to her, and get my book back as well). It had me convinced that someone out there is doing Klosterman a great disservice. An agent? A PR guy? I'm not sure. But not only did they give his novel a horrible, horrible dust jacket summary, they gave this great book an exceedingly stupid title. Not only do those three things sound dumb together, but the book only touches on the first and last, and doesn't deal with drugs at all. Oh yeah, and the back of this book is equally as dumb.

So what does the book do? Well, it sort of defies description. To say that it's a "pop-culture critique" makes it sound shallow and serious all at the same time, but I guess that about covers it. The book is a series of essays about a variety of elements of pop culture. I didn't agree with all of it, nor can I even relate to all of it (Klosterman is about 7 or 8 years older than me, and also a sports fan). But it was pretty much always funny. My favorite chapter was about The Real World, where he described a concurrent roommate situation:

In our lives...there was no Tony Randall. We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason, whatosever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for two people to live. We would consciously choose to put out cigarettes on the carpet when ashtrays were readily available; we would write phone messages on the wall and vomit out the window. And this was a basement apartment.


I also enjoyed Klosterman's travels with a Guns n Roses cover band, and his accounting of how he managed to become the only person in his hometown ever fired from the post of Pee Wee Soccer Coach. It's a clever book about modern culture, and it's funny too. I like Chuck Klosterman.