The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson

I saw the movie made from this book long before I actually read it. And I've read several other books by journalist Jon Ronson before getting to this one, finding him usually breezy and amusing but not always bringing as much depth as I might want. (See Them in particular, and also somewhat The Psychopath Test.)

So I wanted to see if the book The Men Who Stare at Goats was much like the movie, or like Ronson's other books. It was published in late 2004, and it's very much an Iraq-War-era book, a look at a particular wild-hair strain of thinking within the US military-industrial complex, which strain had become somewhat more relevant and visible at that point because the US MIC was flush with cash and taken off its leash and urged to Do Anything that would help in its not-particularly-well-defined mission to Make The World Safe For Americans Again.

The premise of Stare at Goats is: there's a group of US soldiers who have tried to use various psychic or paranormal powers, vaguely centered on Fort Bragg and led in the early Reagan years by a guy named General Stubblebine. Ronson talked to Stubblebine, and then to others that he found, to see what those psychic powers might be, if they were real, and what weird things this bunch of soldiers got up to.

Like Ronson's other books, it's very much a "I talked to This Guy, and this is what he said" book. I think Ronson is of the "don't question a good story" school of journalism, rather than the "if your mother says she loves you, check it out" school. That means there is a lot of material here where Ronson is presenting it somewhat skeptically, or at least wanting the reader to believe that he's not accepting it whole-heartedly, while still presenting the crazy idea, because it's zippy and fun and that's the material he has for this book. What I'm saying is: Stare at Goats would either be a lot shorter (leaving out everything dubious) or a lot longer (explaining why it's dubious) if Ronson had spent any substantial time in fact-checking.

Instead, this is full of those stories that are too good to question, which readers should believe exactly as much as they believe in similar stories. Ron's narrative does intersect with proven, journalistic history multiple times - a CIA agent's mysterious death in 1953, some verified details of interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib, the Heaven's Gate death-cult, and other places - so those are clear facts.

But it also has several retired military leaders who solemnly tell Ronson that they personally witnessed someone stare a goat to death - well, OK, maybe it was a hamster, but still! - that by thinking really hard it's possible to walk through walls, and other patently stupid ideas. Many of those are Vietnam-era guys, and Ronson does note that war as a source of trauma for individuals and the larger US armed forces, so maybe that's his excuse for how delusional so many of them are.

Stare at Goats is a meandering, discursive book. Ronson picks up successive threads, gets told fantastic things by people with axes to grind, does not make any serious efforts to prove those things actually happened, follows up some minor leads until the trail inevitably quickly grows cold, and then moves on to another old military hand with a somewhat different nutty story. There's a vague through-line with Colonel Jim Shannon and his '70s-era manifesto about the First Earth Battalion, a catalog of a whole lot of those nutty ideas that others later developed (or didn't), but Ronson also drops back late in the book to hit MK-ULTRA, the CIA program in the '50s and '60s that dosed scientists with LSD and did other, equally useful and deeply scientific things.

And the lens for every section is whatever guy Ronson talked to: this is the collective story of a bunch of self-aggrandizing folks, many of whom were at the time (just post-911, early Iraq War, when the military contracts were flowing like the oil would be at Rumaila once the fires were put out) trying to get lucrative government contracts to do whatever they claimed they could do and who used Ronson as a way to publicize their amazing powers.

It's a vague, incomplete, and confusingly organized catalog of various "unconventional warfare" ideas that various aspects of the US military and related agencies had in the fifty or so years up to 2004, without any attempt to put any of it into serious historical context, get comments from any then-current government people, or fact-check it. On the other hand, it is funny throughout, it features some absolutely fascinating oddball characters, and there are more than a few actual facts within it for careful readers. And anyone inclined to think large militaries are full of idiots who make bad decisions for venial and self-serving reasons will find much to love.

(The movie turned some this material into a fictionalized, and, as I recall, somewhat more straightforward narrative, in which at least a few of the unconventional warfare tricks actually worked and there was something of a thriller plot in Iraq.)

Murder Book by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell has one of those modern gig-style careers where she does multiple things (I presume to get something vaguely like the life the previous generation had with A Job that they kept for decades). She does burlesque and stand-up comedy, illustrates books for other people, cartoons for The New Yorker and elsewhere, makes documentaries - and has done two book-length comics memoirs about specific aspects of her life and family.

I read the second one, The Joy of Snacking, soon after publication a few months back. It's a dense, fun, amusing and deep look at a woman who has certain very specific issues with food and made that into both a great story and a thoughtful exploration of the world she lives in.

So I figured I had to go back to her first book. Murder Book was published in 2021, and it's just as dense, thoughtful, personal, funny and insightful as Snacking. Both could be reduced to clichés about modern women - Snacking is the "nothing for me; I'll just pick" book, and Murder is the "why are so many women obsessed with true crime podcasts?" one.

Campbell's remit is wider than podcasts, though: she's low-key obsessed with true crime in general, books and movies and streaming TV (and the wider world of ripped-from-the-headlines but not-quite-true crime, like Law & Order) as well as podcasts, and she has several friends and family members (one sister and their mother in particular) just as obsessed as she is. She's honest about the genre: the template true crime story is about the mysterious death of an attractive (young, white, more often than not blonde) woman, and how, usually, Some Man is found to be responsible and brought to justice. 

Murder Book is organized roughly into chapters - she has full-page white-text-on-black headers to introduce sections, but they're not titled like chapters, and the narrative flows conversationally throughout - with an introduction and then sections on the various different types of true crime and true-crime-adjacent media (movies, books, TV like 48 Hours, TV like Law & Order, streaming shows, podcasts, and so on), plus a few more about her family's history with true crime (she traces the obsession back to her mother's mother's mother, which is pretty impressive and/or worrying).

Along the way, she retells some of her "favorite" murder stories - the Zodiac killer and Ted Bundy have long sections, among others - mostly through the lens of how she heard the story and engaged with it. Campbell grew up in northern California in the '90s, and compares that with her mother's life, in San Francisco and nearby, during the serial-killer-soaked '70s: both of them felt like death and murder were everywhere around them, though it was probably more true for her mother than the more media-influenced Campbell.

Like Snacking, this is conversational and funny, with long back-and-forth dialogue and extensive narrative captions: Campbell is telling this story, and it's in her voice throughout. Her art is cartoony, with dot eyes and mostly simple figures. Her pages have panels jammed up right against each other without gutters, and tiers that don't always line up, to keep that headlong, energetic, "I'm going-to-tell-you-everything-I-can-think-of" style.

Campbell does get into the "why do women love true crime so much" question, dipping back into it a couple of times during the book, and tends to come down on the worry/fascination side. True crime is about the deaths of women, so women look at it, think "that could be me," and want to know more. Campbell, as a stand-up comedian, joked that she loved true crime so much she wanted to be a murder victim - but she mostly thinks it's the other way, that women consume so much true crime to learn all of the tricks and keep themselves alive.

It's a big book, and a dense one. It might have more about murder than many people want at once - but, clearly, there is a huge audience for murder, so I don't think that's a major problem.

And Campbell has a lot of fun with it. It's weird to say a book so much about murder is breezy, fun, and amusing, but Murder Book definitely is. It's a passionate observer's guide to true-crime media, combined with her personal history, and still recent enough that it's fairly up-to-date. I'm not personally obsessed with true crime - I'm a man; I think men worry more on the other side of that equation - but Murder Book is a fascinating deep dive into the mostly women who are obsessed with true crime stories, what they find in it, and what it means to them.

Drew Friedman's Chosen People

Can reading a book be an experiment? I thought of this one that way, but that may just be me being precious about something minor.

I've read previous books of Drew Friedman's art digitally, on my old tablet - a ten-year-old jobbie, 9.7 inches I think - and noted that the art was smaller than the real-world book size, so I didn't recommend that. (See my post on Heroes of the Comics in particular; the other relevant Friedman books are All the Presidents, Schtick Figures, and Maverix and Lunatix.)

But I had a birthday recently, and got myself a newer, fancier, bigger tablet. (I'm still getting used to holding it, since it seems to be approximately the size of a coffee table - they say it's 13 inches but it feels larger than that.) And I'm seeing how digital comics look on this new screen: so far, better and clearer, not just larger.

And so I read the 2017 collection of portraits Drew Friedman's Chosen People, and, I have to say, it looks just fine on a big tablet. This slab of metal and glass is close to the size of the real-world book, so the experience is close to the same. If you have a big-ass tablet, as I do now, even large-format books of art and comics look pretty good there.

And I'm glad I had that consumer note to give you because, otherwise, what's there to say about this book? It collects at least a decade of mostly editorial illustrations by Friedman, and is entirely miscellaneous. Friedman has put out some books that were specific projects, with pictures of people with some connection to each other, like Presidents and the Old Jewish Comedians books and the ones of comics-makers, but he also has done books that collect the other stuff he does that pays the bills, like this and Schtick Figures.

There is a section of potted bios in the back to explain who the people are. You might think that would not be difficult, since each page has the person's name, but Friedman often draws very obscure people, either because they intersect with his hobbies and loves (Forrest J. Ackerman, Max Asnas, Richard Deacon, Friedman's own father, grandfather, and brother) or for reasons that cannot be discerned from the book (e.g., Franklin Longbone and Carl P. Sodiwater, both of whom I vaguely suspect of being fictional).

The main section of the book has 117 full-page pictures. The front matter adds an additional picture of Shemp (there are two more later), plus Al Lewis, Friedman's wife Kathy, introducer Merrill Markoe, and Alex Gard, something of an inspiration for the whole project. In the back is a self-portrait with Friedman's bio and a nine-panel grid of a group of people in front of the American flag, which is not explained in any way. (The front cover is Muddy Waters and the back cover is Chris Ware, but both of those also appear inside.) So it tops out at 140 pictures of people, most of whom are "famous" in some way or other.

By the way, "chosen" here means "chosen to have Drew Friedman do their pictures." The person choosing may be Friedman himself much of the time, but also includes editors of various mostly New-York based publications, especially the New York Observer. The potted bios list (consistently? always?) where the illustrations first appeared, with notes on about half of them.

Friedman has a detailed, immersive style - his people look real and grounded. He's never gone out of his way to draw pretty people, and he tends to make them less pretty than they might like - he's an artist of jowls and dewlaps and ragged hairlines, laugh lines and creases and extra chins, scowls and smirks and incredulous glances. This is a fine book of a whole bunch of those drawings, some in color and some in his distinctive black-and-white stippled style, including some people you will recognize and some - no matter who you are - that will be a mystery to you.

Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum & Jon Buller

The "and" in the author line above is doing more heavy lifting than usual: Joshua Slocum and Jon Buller didn't work together in any sense on this book. They never even met.

Well, they couldn't: Slocum disappeared in 1909, and Buller, I'm pretty sure, wasn't even born then. (I can't find biographical details online, but he's a modern illustrator and cartoonist whose career seems to stretch back to about the turn of the century - this century - so he's likely in his forties.)

The original Sailing Alone Around the World was a non-fiction book by Slocum, loosely based on letters he wrote during, yes, a three-year period when he sailed 46,000 miles alone in his sloop Spray from Massachusetts to Massachusetts, the hard way. It was published in 1899, and is one of the standard classics of the adventure-travel genre, on that short shelf with books like The Worst Journey in the World and The Long Walk.

Buller has published a long list of books for children, along with his wife Susan Schade - she writes and he draws mostly early readers and middle-grade books. The two of them did a comics project a few years back, the intriguingly-titled Nudism Comes to Connecticut. But this one seems to be all Buller, working from Slocum's original book.

His version of Sailing Alone Around the World translates Slocum's book into comics form, with mostly big square panels with cleanly-ruled borders and large sections of Slocum's text as captions. His art has a lot of cross-hatching, and his people are slightly cartoony in a vaguely Edward Koren style - both of which both reflect his story-book experience and work well for a story set over a hundred years ago.

Joshua Slocum was a seasoned seaman in the early 1890s, in his mid-forties with years of experience as a master of sailing ships around the world. He'd run off to sea (the time it finally took; he'd tried before) at the age of sixteen in 1860, and had been working since then. But, with the rise of steam ships, his skills were less and less valuable, and it looks like he had a period of unemployment.

So he decided to refurbish a small sloop, the Spray, and plan for that round-the world trip. Buller starts by adapting the work Slocum did to refurbish and rebuild Spray, which took two years - that gets us through the first twenty pages of the book, and then Slocum sets off on his trip.

His initial plan is to go east, and he gets to Gibraltar without too much incident. But there a friendly British ship tells him the southern coast of the Mediterranean is still full of pirates, making Slocum's intended path to the Suez Canal much too dangerous.

So Slocum instead went the other way, recrossing the Atlantic at its narrowest point back over to Brazil and going down the coast of South America and through the Straits of Magellan, where bad weather delayed and diverted him for more than a month.

But he did make it through, and got across the broad Pacific to Australia. He spent some time there, meandering up the east coast and across the north, before setting on across the Indian Ocean, stopping in South Africa and then finally heading back home across the Atlantic a third time.

Along the way, he saw a few pirates - mostly at a distance, mostly in small boats, and mostly "natives" - put in at Juan Fernandez to honor the memory of Alexander Selkirk (the original of Robinson Crusoe) and ran into a lot of seamen he knew from his earlier career or that knew him by reputation. He also ran aground at least once, and had to do extensive repairs in harbor (various ones, all along his journey) multiple times - par for the course for a wooden sailing ship on a long, rough trip.  For a book about sailing alone, there's a fair bit of convivial dinners and 19th century pleasantries, including dialogue that I assume is straight out of Slocum's book.

Sailing Alone is the kind of book that in the reading feels like it was much easier than the work was in reality, so the reader starts to think "I could do this! That would be grand!" in his best 19th century diction. But it was an impressive accomplishment, and Slocum got a fair bit of fame from doing it. His book was a bestseller, making him enough money to buy a farm on Martha's Vineyard, where, of course, he ended up not spending much time, since he preferred to be at sea. It was on the Spray that Slocum disappeared, about a decade later - the assumption is that he died in a rough sea, but, like Ambrose Bierce, his body was never found, so readers can make up any pleasing stories they want.

Gérard: Five Years with Depardieu by Mathieu Sapin

There's a point in the middle of this book where creator Mathieu Sapin claims that Gérard Depardieu is one of the two most famous living French people in the world. He says this in conversation with then-President François Hollande, who he is flattering by saying Hollande is the other most famous French person. When Sapin mentions this to other people later, they mostly agree - well, not about Hollande. He's no Depardieu.

As an American, I also agree: if you think "French actor," Depardieu is the first person who comes to mind for at least a plurality of us. For some more gender-neutral definition of "actor," I would also accept Bridgette Bardot, who is sadly not eligible under the "living" portion. Younger, hipper people might argue for Timothée Chalamet, who I don't think is "French" in the same sense, since he grew up in New York. But Depardieu is definitely world-famous, though maybe becoming less so in recent years as he's gotten older, has been in fewer really globally popular movies, and has had more scandals accumulate (tax exile, sexual assault rumors, a certain chumminess with Putin).

So: Mathieu Sapin is a French bande desinée creator - and possibly a filmmaker, too; we see him work on some projects during this book - who shares a studio with Christophe Blain. (That has nothing to with this book, but Sapin mentions it and shows Blain, so I'll include it as well.) He got pulled into a documentary involving Depardieu taking a trip to Azerbaijan - deliberately replicating a trip by Alexandre Dumas, who was accompanied by a painter - in 2012, and, since he found himself in Depardieu's circle, he thought he might try to stay there if he could and get a book out of it.

Gerard: Five Years with Depardieu is that book; it covers Sapin's experiences with Depardieu starting with that 2012 trip to Azerbaijan and continuing through Depardieu's tax exile a few years later, multiple other projects and opportunities for Depardieu to be big and dominate conversations and talk a lot, before ending with a 2016 trip to Moscow.

The point of this book is "what is Depardieu really like?" and Sapin delivers - he keeps himself involved, as a viewpoint and way into this world, but the focus is on who Depardieu is and what he does. Depardieu is famously active, volcanic, and mercurial, so he gives Sapin a lot of material - he also has the long-time actor's ability to just talk at great length about anything continuously.

Sapin draws himself as physically small and balding - that little guy in the sidecar on the cover - to contrast with the physically imposing Depardieu. He's originally hired to basically lob questions to Depardieu for that documentary, and let the actor run on at length - the one who initiates conversation, and, as much as possible, aims Depardieu at specific topics, but not an equal partner. The rest of the book finds him in roughly the same role: a chronicler, a scribbler in the corner, the guy with a dictaphone to capture the interesting or outrageous things that Depardieu rolls out endlessly, all the time.

You have to have at least some sympathy or interest in Depardieu, of course: why else would you read a book like this? I won't say that Sapin gets any deep insights into Depardieu's essential character or history, and he's not really trying to. This is a book about what's it's like to be in the middle of the whirlwind of activity that is Gérard Depardieu; what happens around him and how he talks and acts on a day-to-day basis. Sapin is not intervewing Depardieu; he's accompanying him.

It's a very wordy book: Depardieu talks a lot, and Sapin needs a lot of captions to explain who everyone is and what's going on, as he drops in and out of Depardieu's life and projects repeatedly over these five years. Sapin has a lightly cartoony style: most of his people are fairly realistic, though he makes himself tiny with a big head. But his background and scenes are mostly realistic, though sometimes lightly sketched, particularly on the pages where he has a lot of captions and dialogue to make room for.

There will be a point where Gérard Depardieu is not longer the most famous Frenchman in the world, and this book will be an interesting relic at that point. But I don't think we're there yet.

The Holy Places & A Tourist in Africa by Evelyn Waugh

I'm pretty sure the point of the Waugh Abroad omnibus, assembled and introduced by Nicholas Shakespeare in 2003, was to gather Evelyn Waugh's pre-War travel books into a single volume, rescuing them from the mostly-obscurity they'd fallen into. Waugh had suppressed them, more or less, for the last decade or so of his life, issuing instead a "good parts" collection of the less-politically-tendentious bits under the title When the Going Was Good.

Those books were Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, Waugh in Abyssinia and - in a different tone and style and not really a travel book in the same sense - Robbery Under Law. I got the Waugh Abroad omnibus soon after it was published, read Labels in 2006, and then finally got back to the rest of those books starting last year.

But that was not the end of the omnibus.

Waugh had two other short books, which came out after WW II, which were suitable for inclusion in a book called Waugh Abroad. And so they were. And now I've read them, too.

The TL;DR is that Waugh got stuffier and grumpier and stodgier and more boring as he got older, and he was not unstuffy and grumpy and stodgy to begin with. His fiction has a lot to recommend it, even towards the end of his life, but his late nonfiction is really for scholars and massive fans and exceptionally right-wing Anglo-Catholics at this point.

With that said, the last two books in that omnibus are The Holy Places and A Tourist in Africa.

The Holy Places is barely a book at all; it comprises one very short introduction and two magazine pieces. I know the bookbinders can do magnificent things, but this is barely twenty-five pages in the omnibus, so I wonder how this appeared on its own in the world.

One essay is about Saint Helena, who was the wife of one Roman Emperor and mother of another in the 4th century. More important to Waugh - so important that he barely mentions it - is that she's credited with discovering the True Cross. Waugh is a true believer, so the fact that it's pretty clear that the jumble of wood she was lumbered with is no such thing - assuming that there was originally a thing that it could be, and I might not even go that far myself - cannot impinge on his thinking. Since she is a saint, she must be a wonderful perfect person, and that's basically what his essay says. It is nice that he had such a durable religico-philosophical underpinning to his thinking, Andy said brightly, searching for something positive to end with.

The other essay is about a trip to Jerusalem in 1952. It is also suffused with the piety of a convert, and some circumlocutiously-worded stuff that I think is grumping about the existence of Israel, because clearly only Christians should be in charge of that land and the world in general. (Preferably Catholics, of course, but Anglicans are mostly all right and those Orthodox chappies have much to recommend them. Waugh is less fond of more radical Protestants.) Muslims are mostly treated as good enough fellows, for lesser races - I suppose because this was before most of the major wars and oil shocks, so they had no power. The essay is decent on architecture and some aspects of history, and it's nice that Waugh had such a resolute faith, I suppose. He's not actively dismissive of Judaism and Islam, I'll add, in an attempt to be somewhat positive.

A Tourist in Africa is somewhat longer - actual book-length, though not a long one - but sketchier and smaller and less well-formed than his pre-war travel books. He admits he hates being in England in the cold weather - and almost admits to hating being with his family at Christmas - and so fled in the winter of 1958-9 for a trip down the East coast of Africa, somewhat visiting places he'd been before the war and at intervals since.

The book is based on a diary he kept at the time, and still maintains a diary format. I suspect that, instead of turning diary notes into a fuller narration and spending some serious time thinking through what he wanted to say, this time Waugh just expanded his notes in situ, threw in some of his usual hobbyhorses, and called it a day. I don't want to say a book about traveling several thousand miles over the course of two months is lazy, but there are definitely aspects of it that show an impulse to take the easiest path.

It is substantially less interesting and detailed than his pre-war travel books. It's still Waugh prose, so there are good lines and specific thoughts throughout - the reader may not agree with those thoughts, and I expect most won't, but they're worth engaging with in one's own head to be clear on why they're wrong.

In that typical old-boy-network way, Waugh avoids giving names to most of the people he meets - it's the commissioner or agent of this particular town, or "R" - though they mostly seem to have been friendly and solicitous and happy to give this visiting dignitary dinners and house-room and the use of their cars and drivers to roam about and see the sights. And, as usual, it will be the rare modern human being who can agree with any of Waugh's political ideas - I'd be very suspicious of anyone in 2026 who could, actually.

I do recommend the Waugh Abroad omnibus - or, at least, the first four books collected in it, which are actually about travel and see Waugh giving insights about places and people he met that are long-gone now. The later bits of that omnibus, though, are for a much more select and massively smaller audience.

That's Not Funny, That's Sick by Ellin Stein

Sometimes I fall into the reading habits of a typical middle-aged man. What I mean is: I hit a point where I can't stand any fiction, and need facts in my books.

I think this is a every-male-reader-in-his-fifties-has-a-tedious-opinion-on-Gettsysburg thing, but it could also be that my editor brain - long-unused professionally, but once switched on, it can never be entirely silenced - is finding things to complain about with every possible novel I'm thinking about reading.

Or why not both? It could easily be both.

So I recently read That's Not Funny, That's Sick, Ellin Stein's [1] 2013 history of the National Lampoon comedy empire of the 1970s. Stein starts with the moment when the two founding editors of the magazine - Henry Beard and Doug Kenney - headed there from Harvard and ends with Kenney's death just over than a decade later.

In between, she pulls in a lot of threads of American comedy. She spends the first chapter mostly setting up the backstory of the Harvard Lampoon, which licensed "Lampoon" to the new national magazine and was the source of a bunch of writers and editors for the NatLamp over the years, and was particularly important in the way it shaped the early NatLamp.

The magazine itself is central for about the first half of the book, but Stein wants to tell the wider story, so the second half of the book is something of a back-and-forth, from the magazine itself to its immediate offshoots: the Lemmings stage show and later similar things, the radio shows, and, most importantly, the actors and writers that worked on the stage and radio shows and then went on to Saturday Night Live and, in some cases, massive fame.

Stein has a very wide remit here, but she's done a lot of original research - there's a long list of people she interviewed in the back matter, and she quotes from those interviews throughout the book. In fact, she seems to have talked to basically everyone still alive - with the inevitable exception of Henry Beard, who I don't think has ever agreed to any interviews, from anyone, about his time at NatLamp. (A Henry Beard biography would be an interesting thing, if anyone could pull it off - but I doubt it would be possible.)

There's a part of me that wanted a more in-depth look at the magazine itself, or maybe a tighter focus on the things that actually had "National Lampoon" in their title. But then Animal House has to be included, and then how do you get John Belushi from Lemmings to Animal House without mentioning SNL? And that's assuming that you keep Stein's basic framing of the first decade - if you run longer, you need to include Vacation, and you have the same problem with Chevy Chase. Stein's implied point, which I have to agree with, is that NatLamp was foundational to a strain of American comedy, and that strain went in blockbuster directions fairly quickly.

There are thus a lot of names in That's Not Funny, from Beard and Kenney to publisher Matty Simmons (and his son Michael, later a NatLamp editor himself) to their Harvard Lampoon predecessors and occasional collaborators Christopher Cerf and George Trow, to later NatLamp writers and editors like Tony Hendra and P.J. O'Rourke and Michael O'Donoghue to the actor/writers like Chase and Belushi and Bill Murray and his older brother Brian Doyle-Murray. Stein includes a twenty-page epilogue bringing the careers of all of the major figures up to the point when she wrote the book - that's an additional thirty years of career, though not all of them lived through all of it.

She also, I think, interviewed some people who did not want to be named, or at least not to have some quotes attributed to them. (Stein is a long-time journalist, which shows in her clean prose and facility in navigating this big, complex group of people with shifting loyalties and relationships to each other.) That's Not Funny is full of the voices of these people - named and unnamed, some from historical documents but largely from Stein's interviews around 2010 when she was writing this book.

The book generally focuses on that first decade, from the magazine's April 1970 launch issue to Kenney's death in August 1980, but does extend the timeline both at the beginning (to explain what the Harvard Lampoon was and to give a quick look at notable events and people of that magazine in the '60s) and the end (to untangle threads and talk about the major projects that especially the SNL actors were working on, even if those didn't emerge until 1983 or 4.)

That's Not Funny doesn't have a central premise or argument to make, other than "this was an important thread in American comedy, and here's how it worked out." Stein covers the schisms and differences of opinion, without, mostly, taking sides in things like the Hendra-O'Donoghue feud. Simmons in particular often has a different view of events than others, a view in which Matty Simmons is more central and important than other people believed, and Stein quietly underlines those moments without explicitly calling him out. She comes across as even-handed, honestly interested in this world and what these people did without being dazzled by any of it.

I suspect that may be because she's an outsider: NatLamp was '70s, aggressive, juvenile, masculine, American. Stein is based in London, a long-time journalist, and obviously female. I don't know if she grew up reading NatLamp at any point - I did, in its later, lesser years, though I also spent the early '80s collecting back issues as well - but, whatever her history, she didn't let that affect her viewpoint or understanding.

This is a fine, even-handed look at an important time in comedy, with lots of insight well-packaged and organized to tell the story in a clear, reasonable, honest way. There may be better books about SNL - there have been a lot there - but there's nothing that comes close about NatLamp.

[1] Pointless digression: this author is only the second person I've heard of with the name of Ellin, after my wife's great-aunt. (The great-aunt spelled it with only one L, which is apparently the Danish spelling. No idea if two Ls means Norwegian or Macedonian or Nepalese.) That may have been one reason why I noticed this book in the first place, actually.

Charlie: Charles Chaplin: The Funniest Man in the World by Seymour Chwast and Steven Brower

I grabbed this from my library app for one simple reason: it was a new book (copyright 2025) by Seymour Chwast, who I am happy to note Wikipedia says is a famous American graphic designer and illustrator. (They swing immediately into the past tense when required.) Chwast is not just a designer: he's one of the titans of mid-20th century design, influential in massive ways.

Implied by what I just said is that Chwast is not young: he was born in 1931. Apparently he's still doing design work through his Push Pin Studios, and he turned to adapting classic literature into comics earlier this century, with Dante's Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, The Odyssey, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court over roughly a decade, over a decade ago. I hadn't seen anything new in that vein for a while, and, given that Chwast is now in his mid-nineties, wasn't holding out lots of hope.

Charlie is not like those prior books, in a bunch of ways. Chwast only drew it; Steven Brower (another renowned ad man, a generation or two younger than Chwast) here provides the words. And, in keeping with the old maxim that the longer the title, the shorter the book, Charlie comes with the double-barreled subtitle Charles Chaplin: The Funniest Man in the World and a slim 32-page package.

Brower's text is in the first person, from the point of view of Chaplin, and tells a short, very focused version of his life story. After a page of Chaplin's childhood (mostly miserable and poverty-stricken), it dives directly into filmography, and stays in that mode to the end. Charlie covers Chaplin's major movies, on a mostly-superficial plot and audience-reaction level, but doesn't get into Chaplin's personal life at all. It doesn't mention any of his wives or children, and leaves a reader with the impression that 1952's Limelight was his last movie. (It wasn't; he directed two more after that and lived for another quarter-century.)

Chwast provides the pictures here, with various spot illos on every page. Given that he's credited first, it's possible that the illustrations existed - maybe even culled from a longer stretch of Chwast's long career? - and Brower wrote around them. They're mostly pen-and-ink, with a few full-page colored-pencils pieces, and mostly in Chwast's Push Pin style. It's not comics format; the style is closer to a picture-book, especially given the length.

So this is a small thing, and somewhat of an odd thing - likely why it was published by Fantagraphics Underground, their oddball short-book imprint, rather than by some larger entity in a larger way. But it does have some new (?) Chwast drawings of Chaplin, many of them charming and evocative, and it does provide a not-horrible potted look at Chaplin's major work.

The Great Cat Massacre by Robert Darnton

The full title of this book, I should note quickly, is The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. It's by the historian Robert Darnton, originally published in 1984, and I am surprised to find that Darnton is both an even bigger deal than I expected (Philips, Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, National Book Critics Circle Award, Harvard Librarian) and is still alive.

And here I will point out that no one who reads this blog will care what I say about this book, and few (any?) even care about its subject. But this blog is a weird, capricious thing - basically a reading notebook I keep in public for odd, contingent, it-just-happened-that-way reasons - so I read whatever I want to read anyway, and then try to write something about it. I do appreciate you, dear readers - both of you - but I don't essentially care that you're out there.

The Great Cat Massacre is an early work in cultural history, which at the time was a somewhat established stream in French historical thought, but was less well-known in the English-speaking world. Darnton's specialty was then, and has been throughout his career, 18th century France. He's also done a lot of work on the history of the book, and seems to be a deeply textual historian - some are more data-focused, some have other interests, but Darnton's core analytical process stems from close reading of particular texts, which I appreciate.

This book presents six loosely related essays, or chapters. Each one looks at a specific text, and digs into the question of what that text tells us about the world it came from - how is that world different from our own, what is strange or surprising, what is distinctive and particular in that text and how that compares to other things we know or read. A long time ago, my own college thesis was vaguely in the same tradition - titled "Infratextual Structures in Poe, Bierce, and Lovecraft" when published in Lovecraft Studies #21; I think my original title didn't have the author names - so this is something I am inclined to be interested in (and, likely, boring about).

So Darnton first looks at fairy tales - in a very structured, research-driven way, comparing versions collected from the oral tradition with the more literary versions from particularly Perrault (since Darnton's focus is on France) but also the Grimms and other retellers across Europe - to, at first, debunk some very Freudian fairy-tale interpretations that were popular in the 1970s. The fairy-tale essay is the longest, and extends much farther than that initial focus; its goal, which Darnton admits is ambitious and declares can never be entirely complete, is to understand the cultural context of these stories. Who told them, to whom, and how were they understood at the time? If they are cautionary tales, what were they cautioning 18th century children against?

Darnton moves on from there to a printers-apprentice's account of that titular cat massacre, which, in his compelling telling, was mostly a sideways attack on the power and prestige of his master and especially his master's wife. Let me quote from his conclusion (on p.262) a passage that helps explain the mindset and point of the entire exercise of these essays:

As I tried to illustrate in explicating the cat massacre of the rue Saint-Séverin, the most promising moment in research can be the most puzzling. When we run into something that seems unthinkable to us, we may have hit upon a valid point of entry to an alien mentality, And once we have puzzled through to the native's point of view, we should be able to roam about in his symbolic world. To get the joke in the case of something as unfunny as a ritual slaughter of cats is a first step towards "getting" the culture.

Darnton is an academic, but writes in a reasonably clear style within that form. He does hedge his points, always being clear what he's willing to claim and what is speculation, and has a massive number of endnotes giving further reading, which I mostly skimmed.

The later chapters include one about the Encyclopedia, one on Rousseau, one on the reading life of a somewhat typical small-city bourgeois, and one on what looks like a fascinating treasure-trove of dossiers and documents from a police inspector tasked around 1750 with keeping track of the literary world of France, mostly because many of them were considered subversive. Darnton's methods are serious and, again, inherently academic, but he does seem to be one of the first to think about doing such close reading and implication-hunting in documents like these for an English-language audience.

And, of course, Darnton's topics are mostly about the world of books and reading - who read what, what lessons they took from it, how writers were seen by the authorities, what folktales "meant" to the people who retold them, and similar things. So those of us inclined to geek out on bookish topics are more likely to enjoy a book of Darnton's than one by another historian who concentrates, for example, on the lives of flax-weavers.

(Note: I have no clear idea of what flax is, nor whether it is possible to weave it.)

This is a forty-plus-year-old book; I found a used copy randomly a decade ago, and it's probably only vaguely in print, if that. I have no illusions many other people will want this particular book. But I do hope the kind of people who would read this blog are interested in the intellectual history of reading, in the question of how people in different times understood the world, and how we can understand people who are very different from us. In all those areas, Darnton has much to say.

Roughing It by Mark Twain

I've vaguely wanted to re-read Roughing It for a few years now. The last time the urge rose, I didn't have a copy on hand and read Life on the Mississippi instead, but, this time, availability and interest coincided. (I read it in the Library of America omnibus with The Innocents Abroad, which is what I linked from the title above.)

This will not be any kind of formal review or critical evaluation: I've been out of the editorial mills for two decades and, even then, was much more focused on commercial possibilities than literary analysis. But Roughing It is a wonderfully fun book, a collection of almost-random pieces by a young writer still discovering what he can do, and I hope I can inspire some new readers to pick it up.

As an old editorial hand, what struck me this time was how much of a second book this is. Twain had traveled to Europe and "the Holy Land" as a newspaper correspondent in 1867, then turned his newspaper columns into the very successful The Innocents Abroad.

Here I want to note that Roughing It has sometimes been published as The Innocents at Home, from which we can all take the lesson that publishers were always the same, ready to take advantage of any opportunity they could see or manufacture. (And good for them!)

Innocents was a major travel book, one that helped define what was a nascent genre in the late 19th century. It covered one trip, of about a half-year duration, with a consistent "cast" and something like a plotline supplied by the itinerary of the ship. Roughing It, on the other hand, isn't any of those things. To me, it reads like a publisher, or maybe Twain himself, asked "what else do you have like Innocents?" and the answer was "everything!"

Roughing It covers seven years of Twain's life - parts of it in greater detail than others. Mississippi, almost a decade later, went back to the years just before that, when he was a steamboat pilot on the big river, but the outbreak of the Civil War put an end to that career.

Twain doesn't mention either the War or his riverboat piloting in Roughing It. He begins with the journey - his older brother Orion was appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, and Twain (in his civilian guise as Sam Clemens) was Orion's personal secretary. The trip across the country - and out of the country, because Nevada and nearby regions were all territories and not states in those days, half-wilderness and thinly populated - takes up the first fifth of the book, a long journey by stagecoach from Missouri, full of local color, stories about Indians and bandits, and lots of details of what that kind of trip was like, for an audience that was already forgetting it with the rise of the railroad. There's also something of a sidebar about Utah and the Mormons, since Twain and company stopped in Salt Lake City for a break on their way to Nevada.

From there, it looks like Roughing It will be the story of Twain's life in that Nevada territory, during the years of silver mania. Twain does some mining for silver himself, and - like most of the population - spends even more time and energy speculating in stock certificates from various mines and getting caught up in various manias, all of which are guaranteed to make him fabulously rich right up into the moment where the whole thing falls apart and he's left with worthless paper.

But Twain gets himself into newspaper work in the middle of this time, and the book starts shifting - first to various fictional or non-fictional stories about colorful figures of the area: miners, criminals, and lawmen. Then Twain himself heads off to San Francisco, for reasons that are clear enough to him at the time, and the last third or so of the book is very miscellaneous, covering the next three or four years in patchwork form. There's a long trip to the "Sandwich Islands" (Hawaii) that takes up almost the last hundred pages, which is the most like Innocents, though without the actual tour-company compatriots that Twain got so much material out of for the previous book.

So Roughing It is a book of parts: the trip West, mining in Nevada, newspaper work there and in San Francisco, and finally the big Hawaii trip. Twain papers over the discontinuities, which means many  chapters start with something like "After a three months' absence, I found myself in San Francisco again, without a cent." (From Chapter LXII) The early material - about the journey and silver-mining - are stronger and more focused than the back half of the book, so one can wish that some editor had been able to get Twain to a shorter, tighter book. (But how often is that the wish, with so many writers.)

I still think of Roughing It as my favorite Twain book: it has all of his strengths and little of the sourness that came into his work later in life. It's full of tall tales, real and invented, and details of life in several places and times of great interest. One thing the book won't tell you, but is fascinating in retrospect, is that during most of this period the Civil War was raging a thousand or so miles east of Twain and his silver-mining adventures. The world is big; even when there's an Obvious Story going on, individuals have their own stories - and they're often completely unrelated.

Paradise Bronx by Ian Frazier

Ian Frazier's serious writings are about the places and people around him more than you might expect from a New Yorker writer and reporter. But I also mean "around" somewhat expansively - that Frazier looks around, from wherever he is at the moment, and writes about the distinctive things and people there.

I can most obviously connect Family into that scheme, and Gone to New York, which is largely the story of his life, also fits. Great Plains is somewhat less so, though I could make an argument it arose from Family, and from growing up in the Midwest and looking both East (where he went first, to Harvard and then New York) and West (to those plains and living in Missoula, Montana for what I think were two stretches of his life). And then On the Rez clearly followed Plains and was largely about one friend of Frazier's, an Oglala Sioux man he met on the streets of NYC and followed back to those plains to see where he came from and what his people were like.

I'm not sure quite what the deal with Travels in Siberia is, but I'm sure I can make it fit into this framework with a bit more effort, if the panel sees fit to extend funding.

Anyway, Frazier's newest book - which is also one of his longest - is somewhat in the same vein. Paradise Bronx is explicitly a love-letter to New York City's largest, most spread-out, most diverse borough, and the only one that's actually "on the continent," as Frazier puts it. Frazier never lived in the Bronx, but he lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and has spent the last twenty-some years (I think) in a New Jersey suburb, from which he's traveled into the city, and in particular the Bronx, what seems to be quite a lot.

Like Frazier's other long, serious books, this is a combination of the sit-and-research book and the walk-around-and-talk-to-people book. I suspect Frazier has had a number of New Yorker stories about the Bronx during the past decade or so, and that either the actual articles or new versions based on his notes have made their way into this book - I'd call that a large part of the walking-around aspect of the book. Frazier also notes he's a big walker in general; he's walked across the Bronx multiple times in multiple directions, including getting down under major interstate intersections and trying to figure out where various colonial-era events happened.

Paradise Bronx is divided into three sections. "Nobody, or a Nation" is the deep history - mostly that colonial era, where what was then just called "Westchester" saw a lot of activity, particularly during the Revolutionary War. It also follows the life and career of Gouverneur Morris, a mostly-forgotten (and hard-to-spell) Founding Father who wrote a lot of the Constitution, was an important envoy to France during their Revolution, and did a bunch of other interesting things along the way.

The middle section, "Paradise," is somewhat transitional, covering basically everything about the Bronx from the early 1800s through roughly 1970 and presenting roughly the end of that era (particularly the 1930s and 1940s, slightly less the post-war period) as something of a golden age: good housing, strong social cohesion, mostly friendly neighborhoods, relatively even-handed governance. Frazier did not himself grow up in the Bronx, but he did grow up at the end of that era, so some readers may detect in this a new mutant strain of Boomer Special Pleading, My Childhood Was The Bestsest In The Whole Wide World Division.

And then the last section is "Fall and Rise," covering the "Bronx is Burning" years of the '70s, the hip-hop revolution soon afterward, and what the modern-day Bronx is like. Robert Moses, the source of nearly everything modern New Yorkers hate about their city - as well as several things they love - comes in for commentary, though not in any depth; Frazier assumes we already know the story and arguments. Here's where the other voices show up most strongly: Frazier wandered around the Bronx for years and talked to a lot of people; he brings out many of their stories here.

Frazier is an optimist, and he sees reason to be optimistic about the Bronx. He was writing this book, from internal evidence, mostly about 2019-2022, through the peak Covid years, and still was optimistic. This is a positive, surprisingly sunny book about a place most people think of as a punch-line. (My own biggest memory of the Bronx is accidentally walking across more of the South Bronx than expected or wise after getting off a subway on my way to an interview in 1990. I accidentally turned the wrong direction and went completely the opposite direction from the office I was looking for. But I called them when I got back to a payphone, and I rescheduled the interview, and they actually eventually offered me that job. That was one of the vanishly few times I've been on the ground in the Bronx; I ended up taking a different job in Manhattan instead, even though it paid substantially less.)

Non-fiction books are for telling you things you don't know, and often things you didn't know you might have wanted to know. Paradise Bronx is a great example of that: nearly everything in this book is something you don't know that you don't know, and most of it is worth knowing. Even better, Frazier's attitude and viewpoint makes it all fascinating and uplifting.

The Age of Video Games by Jean Zeid & Émilie Rouge

Comics are a global industry; they're created in all corners of the world, and often travel far from their native shores, if the content works in the new countries. That's a good thing: something to be celebrated and encouraged.

Andrews McMeel, though, does not seem to agree. They have gone out of their way to disguise that the book The Age of Video Games - published in 2024 by Les Arènes, in 2025 by AMcM - is  originally - gasp! horror! - French.

They bury their copyright page at the very end of the book, and bury deeply there the credit "translated and lettered by Jen Vaughn" - note that this includes a fairly substantial part of the credits of the book, and I'm just talking about the lettering here. It's all pointless, because this is a book by two people named Jean Zeid (a man named Jean; even the dimmest AMcM executive must realize that screams French) and Émilie Rouge (which also sounds pretty clearly French).

Zeid is a journalist who has focused on video games; Rouge is an illustrator who has done a variety of things (there's a whole section of fake media on her site that I bet is from some single unnamed project, and it fascinates me). Here they appear as themselves to explore the whole global history of video games in a little under two hundred and fifty pages. 

The frame story is fun and a bit frivolous: Zeid and Rouge are joined by "Roby," a flying talking robot thingy, who looks like a handheld console, and maybe is supposed to be one, and they have video-game-ish travails several times over the course of the book.

But the core of the book is a detailed, well-sourced overview of video games, in all of its manifestations, starting with Space War! in 1960 and moving forward from there. Well, repeatedly moving forward from there - games had multiple, mostly separate strands, especially in the early decades, so Zeid and Rouge have separate chapters on arcade games, home consoles, and home PCs that overlap in time and occasionally in characters. The later chapters, once the field had professionalized and mostly merged, continues the story forward through the '80s and '90s and so forth, each chapter focusing on one time period or one major change (CD-ROMs and the '90s wave of consoles, casual games on phones, multiplayer games played via networks, etc.)

They find space to show a lot of people; this is a book that credits individuals for their work, and not just faceless corporations. So we see the famous names, like Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto, but also a lot of historically-important figures and newer indy-game makers. Zeid and Rogue seem to be trying to be both global and inclusive; they specifically mention a lot of women creators, possibly slightly out of proportion to their impact on the field.

And there is that light overall story, with the avatars of creators Zeid and Rouge, plus the robot/console/AI Roby, who - as required by an AI in anything video-game-related - will need to be defeated in the final level.

It's a fairly big book, with lots of detail, told in an engaging way. Zeid is clearly an expert, and Rouge makes fun pages - colorful but slightly desaturated, somewhat cartoony but not really looking like a video game, which I found very appealing. (I can imagine a version of this book that tried to look like a modern AAA title throughout, or that changed art style every chapter to match the look of the era it's representing - Rouge does a little of the latter, for spice and style, but keeps most of her work consistent, which I appreciated.)

Big comics histories of random things seem to be at least a minor genre in France, and we've been seeing many of them making their way to the US in translation. I prefer it when publishers actually make that clear - unlike Andrews McMeel here - but just having the books is a good thing, especially when they're as amusing and informative as this one.

Class Clown by Dave Barry

Dave Barry has written a lot of books over the years, and plenty of other things, but he hasn't written a memoir before. However, every successful writer who lives long enough finds the pull of "tell us your fascinating life story" to be unavoidable, and so Barry's new book for 2025 was the story of Who He Is and How He Came To Be.

(He's a guy from Armonk, NY who went into the newspaper business when that was thriving, had a knack for humor that he relentlessly cultivated for decades, and expanded his empire through hard work and a newspaperman's gleeful disdain for hate mail, as a very high-level overview.)

Class Clown is that story, subtitled both "The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass" and "How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up." It's fairly short and zippy, like all of Barry's writing: he trained early on writing copy that people would want to finish rather than flipping the page to the bridge column or the weather report, and he still has that facility and the goofball tone he's cultivated over the years. (Standard disclaimer here that writing short, zippy, and breezy is vastly harder than it looks: it takes a lot of work to be effortlessly readable.)

This has some elements of Standard Boomer Memoir, since Barry is a Boomer and that's the life he lived. It comes out most strongly in the first couple of chapters, about his childhood and parents and schooling, which were, in his telling, about as wonderful as anything was possible to ever be. (Memoirs are very binary: a childhood was either idyllic or horrific. Barry falls on the former end.) Barry doesn't belabor the point, and he does get into some negative things about his parents briefly, mostly after he grew up. But you will get the usual joke about Duck and Cover, among other old favorites.

Most of the book is about his career, though, since that's what his audience cares about. Barry had a syndicated newspaper column for around twenty years (1983 to 2005, in retrospect the high-water mark of newspaper domination of the media scene), and turned columns into books almost immediately, putting out a nearly-annual string of bestsellers that were all-new material (I will guestimate) about half of the time. He even became a novelist - I remember really liking his first two, Carl Hiaasen-esque kitchen-sink Florida thrillers, though I have one more unread book in that vein sitting on my shelf and he's written a bunch of other fiction (alone and in collaboration) that I haven't gotten to.

Barry tells us about all those things, plus the lousy rock group of famous authors, the Rock Bottom Remainders, that he's been part of for thirtyish years, the TV show made from his work in the '90s - no, really, he was that famous that Harry Anderson played him weekly on TV for multiple seasons. Barry has had what seems like an interesting life, and he's not precious about it: he comes across as frankly amazed about some of the things he's done (wrote for Steve Martin hosting the Oscars! his second TV appearance, for his first, small-published book, was on Johnny Carson!) and really happy that he got to make jokes in public so long and in so many ways.

Again, Barry was lucky enough to write during the great zenith of the newspaper columnist, and I think he realizes that. He had a huge audience, and he kept it engaged - and knew exactly how to do it, as I will illustrate with a quote from pp.118-119:

Not to toot my own horn, but I was the only nationally syndicated columnist, and I include George Will in this statement, willing to write consistently about toilet-related issues. My readers appreciated this and were always sending me relevant articles clipped from their local newspapers. If a toilet exploded anywhere in the English-speaking world, or a snake showed up in a toilet - you'd be surprised how often these things happen - there was an excellent chance my readers would alert me.

The only potentially upsetting or contentious stuff - other than from the kind of readers who sent angry letters about his booger jokes or causal mocking of Neil Diamond or random negative references to their city or state - is the chapter on Politics. Barry covered the presidential race, in his usual joking manner, from 1984 through 2016, and he has the old-time newspaperman's disdain for both politicians and the way newspapermen cover them. (He notes midway through this chapter that he's a libertarian, which absolutely tracks - though I would have hoped for a bit more engagement from the son of a man who was both a Presbyterian minister and a leader of the New York City Mission Society. Barry even attended the 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech as a guest of the Urban League; I will note that he doesn't seem to be the modern, racist kind of libertarian.) It was all the same sort of thing, as he tells it, until Trump came along and everything got ruined. He appears to be willing to maybe allow that some of the ruin is due to Trump directly - he claims to hate Trump, in the way that rich older white guys in red states with outdated vaguely liberal credentials do claim - but also thinks that the media was just too hard on the poor fella, which caused him to win. I wonder if he would say the same today.

But Class Clown is 99% funny stuff, as expected. Barry has been funny consistently in public for about forty years, and this is the story of how he did that. His work has rarely been deep - like any columnist, he did get serious now and then, and those tend to be the columns that are best-remembered later - but it's been consistent, and it's been good, and it's been entertaining. Class Clown not only gives us that story, it also includes bits of his old writing from the time throughout, because why should Barry write a new version of something he did right the first time? So there's also a slight "greatest hits" feel to the book as well.

Your Caption Has Been Selected by Lawrence Wood

This book is less official than I thought - not that that's a bad thing, but I should note it.

Lawrence Wood is the reigning champion of the New Yorker's weekly Cartoon Caption Contest - he's won eight times and been a finalist fifteen times, far above anyone else. Bob Mankoff is the founding editor of that contest, though he left the New Yorker a few years back. Wood, supported and introduced by Mankoff, wrote Your Caption Has Been Selected to explain what the contest is, how it works, and, most importantly, how entrants can maximize their chances of winning.

(The long and informative subtitle, as required by any nonfiction book, is "More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know About The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.")

Your Caption was published by St. Martin's Press in 2024, and is not officially endorsed or otherwise directly connected with The New Yorker, as a disclaimer on the copyright page states. But...it does reprint more than a hundred New Yorker "drawings," with and without captions, so old-publishing-hand me suspects there was some kind of underlying agreement, possibly brokered by Mankoff.

Obviously, the audience for Your Caption is made up almost entirely of people who are already well aware of the Cartoon Caption Contest, and probably enter it regularly. (I used to enter back in the early days, but fell off the wagon some years ago and have never quite remembered to start up again.) So the "what is it" portion of the book is short and somewhat perfunctory - and it's not that hard to explain, anyway. 

Here's my potted version: The New Yorker posts a "drawing" without a caption on Week One, and during that week collects reader-contributed captions for it, which are also up- and down-voted by readers and sorted by a semi-automated system. In Week Two, an august board of New Yorker worthies selects three finalists, which are presented for a final reader vote in Week Three. Week Four sees the winning caption published.

Wood uses about a hundred examples, including the first few annual versions of the Contest going back to 1999, to discuss, in concrete terms, what makes a good cartoon caption and what should be avoided. His lessons are generally pretty good ones: be short, address the elements of the cartoon (who is speaking, any incongruities, all the major oddities), avoid the obvious jokes that everyone else will think of, and put it into the best words for the idea possible. He has some more detailed rules, too, which are also good - don't take my thumbnail here as covering it all.

This is a fun book about cartoons, which delves more deeply into how and why single-panel cartoons are funny - and the ways in which they can attempt to be funny and fail - than a "normal" collection of cartoons. If you're the kind of person interested in theories of humor, this is a good choice. Or if you just want to see your name in The New Yorker and win a contest - it could be useful there, too.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History by Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson

For whatever reason, I've been reading books about the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show this past year - Frank Conniff's movie-essays-cum-memoirs, the great '90s Amazing Colossal Episode Guide by the team, and, most relevantly for today, Dale Sherman's history of the show, The Worst We Can Find.

Today's book is in the same vein as Sherman's - luckily, they have very different focuses and audiences. Sherman's book was a show-biz history, for a show-biz publisher - heavy on the personalities and the work they did, and on connections to similar projects before and after. It also was a pretty general-reader-friendly history of the show itself, the careers of the major players since (they were all fairly young, and didn't have much of a career to speak of before, except for Joel Hodgson), and where "riffing" came from in popular culture and what has happened in that space since the show was first cancelled in 1999.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History is a more academic book, by two professors, Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson. It seems to be a bit shorter than Sherman, but substantially denser, and vastly more interested in what riffing means - the stance of the audience to a creative work, the interplay between an existing work and commentary on it, and things like that. (Sample sentence: "The series also operates as a form of culture jamming, a type of protest used to disrupt media culture and its attendant cultural institutions such as corporate advertising" on p.46.)

It does also include the history of the show, with plenty of quotes from the major players from articles and publicity material of the time. It's just as well-researched as Sherman, maybe more so, with a nine-page bibliography and fifteen pages of notes in the backmatter. But it is vastly less concerned about what these people did and vastly more interested in the why of it and particularly what it all means.

Academics gonna academic, of course. And the subtitle is "A Cultural History" - this is part of a larger series from its publisher about what specific TV shows mean in popular culture, what they stand for or represent or indicate.

I generally agree with Foy and Olson's connections and find them interesting, while still thinking this book is a tad dry and much less general-reader-friendly than the others I mentioned above. If you want a general history of the show and its main players, Sherman is probably better for you.

But if you want to think about what it means for an audience to add their own jokes to an artistic work - or to seek out kinds of art that embed commentary on top of an existing work - this book will give you a lot of mull over. And if you are an academic, or have that background, it will be more familiar and accessible to you.

Robbery Under Law by Evelyn Waugh

I've been reading a bunch of Evelyn Waugh's travel books over about the past year, in a big omnibus called Waugh Abroad. I've generally enjoyed them: Waugh was a right-wing nutbar, just this side of fascist and absolutely loony in the ways only an upper-class Englishman converted to Catholicism in adult life could be, but he was also a fine writer with a great eye and a world-class grump. So seeing him go to various Third World - I think the term didn't exist yet, but that's what it was - hells in the '30s and complain about them is a lot of fun.

The next book collected in Waugh Abroad was Robbery Under Law, subtitled "The Mexican Object-Lesson." Waugh did travel to Mexico for a few months in 1938 and wrote this book immediately thereafter, it is true. But this, sadly, is not a travel book. It's a tedious, tendentious screed that is probably only of interest as an example of what the kind of right-wing people who thought fascists were really good at building roads and keeping the lesser races down but still were going too far in the whole government-controlling-the-economy-thing considered important in 1938.

Mexico, at the time, had been through a century or more of turmoil since independence, and had had a sequence of corrupt and/or incompetent leaders, who each in turn stole what they could and either fled or the country, or, more often, were murdered by their successors. In 1938, they were officially Marxist and had suppressed the Catholic Church, two aspects of their society that Waugh, of course, hated with every fiber of his being. So, being a professional writer, he therefore spent over two hundred tightly-set pages writing against those things at great and deeply boring length. Let me be clear: it seems like Mexico was a horrible place, run by thieves and charlatans for their own benefit, and had been (with slightly different fools and charlatans, each in their turn) for decades at that point. But the things Waugh was most annoyed about are the nationalization of the oil business and the breaking up of the large estates of the rural aristocracy. And one is hard-pressed, a hundred years later, to care about either of those things if one has anything like a modern political sensibility - even a very right-wing modern political sensibility.

I was hoping for stories of Waugh traveling through another corrupt, odd country and telling the reader about it. There is a quick list of sketched moments in one chapter here: all of the rest is argumentation. And, again, unless you're the kind of interwar Anglo-Catholic Waugh was - not necessarily deeply racist, but satisfied with the hierarchies of the world, since he's near the top of them, and sure that democracy is good for the right kind of peoples, the ones with mostly pale skins - you are not going to agree with a lot of what he says.

In fact, when he tries to cover the expected objections to his position, he inadvertently implies that things were pretty horrible. Oh, sure, he says, some bishops probably abused their power, especially far from the capital - how could it be otherwise? - and, of course, the upper ranks of the priesthood was mostly made up of aristocratic younger sons, who are used to living in riches and splendor, so you can't be surprised that they continued to amass great wealth and spend it on themselves, even once they were  in religious orders. This goes on in several directions, throughout the book, and the astute reader gets a good sense of what Waugh would be happy with: the stable, organized world in which people like him are firmly on top and the Indians - he says, magnanimously, that they're not necessarily mentally inferior to "the white races," that Mexicans as a "race" have interbred between the Spanish and the "Indians" quite a lot (and he doesn't even more than very slightly hint that might be the source of their ongoing political problems), and some of those not-purely-Spanish chappies have even become quite good priests! - know their place down at the bottom of the heap.

It's too bad, because clearly Mexico was a horrible place in 1938. Waugh, though, is not the one who can describe those horrors in a way that anyone to the left of Roderick Spode will agree with. I would only recommend reading this if you've already gotten through all of the good Waugh, and probably some of the other all-too-Catholic pieces as well. Or, of course, if you are a fanatically right-wing Anglo-Catholic with fascist tendencies: it'll be right up your street.

Captain Cuttle's Mailbag edited by Edward Welch

Miscellaneous books are difficult to write about; old ones even more so. I'm going to try to explain what this book is, but I may be like a blind man describing an elephant - it's weird and quirky and very much of its time while also being a surprisingly early example of what looks a lot like a random listserv.

Captain Cuttle's Mailbag is a collection of entries, organized into thematic chapters, from the first series (1849-1855) of the weekly London magazine Notes and Queries. It was compiled for publication in 2017 by Edward Welch, whose short bio describes him mostly as a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. He also gave it the descriptive subtitle - as required for nearly every nonfiction book - "History, Folklore & Victorian Pedantry from the pages of 'Notes & Queries.'"

Notes & Queries was a reader-contributed periodical, described at launch as "a medium of inter-communication for literary men, antiquaries, genealogists, etc." Welch doesn't give us much of a sense of how it was laid out or organized, but the way it seemed to work was: some guy would send either an interesting note on some random thing he had noticed or researched, or a query about something similarly obscure. That note would be published, and sometimes other guys, from elsewhere in the UK, would chime in on the same subject, to amplify what the first guy said, give a wider context, or run off in their own direction - and those would be published in later weeks, leading to what could be a slow-motion conversation.

N&Q seems to have been made up of a bewildering myriad of small items every week - again, not a million miles away from some early-90s email listserv. Welch organized this book into four large sections - Anecdotes of History, Relics of Folklore, Language and Literature, and Scientific Investigation - each of which is broken into maybe half-a-dozen chapters on more specific topics. Contributors don't really recur in this book, so it's one long string of variously pedantic and stuffed-shirt Victorian men (some clearly more cranks than others) writing in their best "serious" style to one another to impress each other with their erudition and/or request information for deeply specific and often pointless-sounding researches.

It's generally amusing and fun: the short pieces make it a good book to dip into at random times, and the organization means you can read four or five bits on epitaphs, or rural superstitions, or all the birds named in Shakespeare when you feel in the mood. The mindset is deeply Victorian, as you would expect: there's an occasional comment on something being "suitable for reading in the family," meaning that there's nothing that could possibly be offensive to the most nervous five-year-old girl imaginable. One might also detect certain attitudes towards the rural peasantry, foreigners, and women that the reader (one hopes) does not share.

It's a neat book that gets a reader deeply into the mindset of a previous era, and provides that useful parallax view: that people back then were still people, with a lot of the same concerns, issues, and problems as we do today, but that they also had substantially different backgrounds, standard ideas, prejudices, and mindsets. So they're the same as us...except in the ways they're massively different.

The Joy of Snacking by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

There were three major comics memoirs by women in the fall of 2025, all about the same cluster of topics: eating, cooking, family, and how those things are connected. I don't know if it's going to be surprising to anyone that many women have issues around both eating (their bodies are often policed by others) and cooking (they are generally assumed to be responsible for feeding the people around them), but the cluster is an interesting thing, and I hope someone better-qualified than me (an actual woman, at a minimum) digs in and looks at the three books together.

I first saw Jennifer Hayden's Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner, published in November, leaning towards the production side of food and making comic hay about Hayden's inability or unwillingness to do it well. Then I noticed My Perfectly Imperfect Body by Debbie Tung from September, which is more focused on the consumption side of food, and a bout of disordered eating in Tung's youth.

Published in between the two of those is The Joy of Snacking, from Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, whose work I've seen as a cartoonist in The New Yorker, but has also done a previous comics memoir, illustrated several other books, made a few documentary movies, and also works in burlesque.

Snacking is mostly about eating - young Hilary was what we call "a picky eater," and that's continued into her adult life. (She's now in her early thirties.) The spine of this book is, as the title implies, "snacking" - Campbell is one of those people who eats lots of little bits all day long, isn't terribly fond of big meals, and tends to focus on a few preferred, beloved, standard snacks. (She also says this is a youngest-kid thing, which made me realize my younger son is also a grazer - there's a kind of bowl that he uses to gather stuff to eat, and we see them pile up in the sink - so I tentatively think her theory has some merit and she should get a major research grant to investigate it.)

Campbell organizes Snacking into loose chapters, bouncing between two timelines: her childhood and young-adulthood, as she discovered new foods and mostly tried to avoid them, and the last few years and her tumultuous relationship with a man she calls E. Separating scenes or sections are cookbook-like pages, which are each about a food Campbell likes - apples and peanut butter, or "a baggie of goldfish," or "a bowl of potato chips," or Cool Ranch Doritos - with details on how to "prepare" them, when and where to eat them, and their significance to her.

It might be the fact that this isn't her first memoir, but I found Campbell to be harder on herself than other people - in particular, E comes across (maybe, though, because I am a man) as a fairly reasonable guy trying to live with Campbell's issues, as the two of them snipe at each other in that deeply nasty way some couples develop. I'm sure he had his flaws, but I felt that Campbell presented him in a mostly-positive light: he's a guy who is in many ways her opposite (a foodie who works selling wine to restaurants!), but they made it work, more or less, for a number of years.

This is not a how-I-changed book, or a I-fixed-my-problem book. Campbell likes snacking. She's going to continue doing it. On the other hand, this isn't entirely a celebration, since she's also clear that she had a weird, often unpleasant childhood because of her food issues, and that it's affected her adult life in ways she doesn't like. That tension plays out throughout the book - can she be herself, eat the stuff she likes (and maybe "normal" food, too, OK, sure, sometimes), and go through life with less stress and anxiety? Well, maybe. But how about some popcorn and white wine now, while she thinks about it?

This is a big book, with some aspects I've not even mentioned - Campbell traces the eating habits of her parents as well in flashback sections, so it's not just a book about her individually - and a warm open-heartedness I found deeply engaging. Campbell has a cartoony, dense style here: her people are loosely defined with thin lines, her panels are many and jammed together without gutters, her dialogue is long and rambling, like real people. This is a fun book about a distinctive person who's not afraid to show herself being odd and quirky - that's the whole point of the exercise. I don't know if anyone else eats quite like Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell does, but, then again, do any of us really eat like all of the rest of us? This book made me wonder that - and that's a good thing to wonder about.