Cranial Fracking by Ian Frazier

This will probably be short, since I want to avoid any semblance of frog-dissection.

Cranial Fracking was a new collection of short pieces by Ian Frazier, published in 2021. It collected forty-four humorous works, all but a couple of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. (As "Shouts & Murmurs," is my guess - the book doesn't say that specifically, but it's the traditional place for short humor in that magazine, and if anything in American culture is more bound by tradition than the New Yorker, I'd like to see it.)

Frazier's had three previous similar books, Dating Your Mom, Coyote V. Acme and Lamentations of the Father. And I think there was some humor in the more general Gone to New York. And The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days was definitely humor, and did grow out of New Yorker pieces, but it was billed as, and mostly worked as, a novel. 

I wrote about Frazier's take on that standard New Yorker humorous piece when I read Coyote a decade ago, and I still agree with what I said then. Basically: it descends from S.J. Perelman, particularly from the Perelmanian habit of taking one or two news cuttings and then running changes on particular quirky phrasing or ideas. Sometimes, in the advanced form, the news cuttings are not included; the reader is meant to recognize the cultural thing being commented on without aids. This, obviously, is somewhat easier in a weekly magazine than in a collection issued ten to fifteen years later.

Humor is subjective, so what I can say is that Frazier is good at the Perelman-derived form without being a verbal follower of Perelman most of the time. His work is more straightforward, and usually takes a crisp journalistic tone, sometimes shading into marketing copy and occasionally something more baroque. I haven't read The New Yorker regularly for probably a decade, but I found all of this understandable and all of it funny and some of it hilarious.

Your mileage will vary; that's how humor works. But Frazier is one of our best working today, so you should check him out if you like verbal inventiveness, wit, and ingenious ideas worked out in quick, engaging ways. This is a short book with a lot of variety in it; I'd hope most people would find some things they found really funny.