Very Well Read

I'm a big fan of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Despite not having cable for the last 5+ years, I've always kept up with the show by watching clips on the Comedy Central website. All of their correspondents are hilarious and Lewis Black is no exception. He yells and rants like a neo-Con, but he's totally a lefty. So he's yelling and ranting about things that drive me crazy, things that make me yell and rant too. So when I saw this book of his at the library, I knew it would be a good read. I think Jon Stewart summed it up well in his quotation on the back of the book:

Lewis Black is the only person I know who can actually yell in print form.
-Jon Stewart

The first quotation from this book that is worth recording is the dedication:

This book is dedicated to all of my friends who helped me get to where I am today -- you know who you are... and when I find you I am going to kill you.

Now that's a dedication!

Many other fine quotations come from the chapter titles and/or their taglines, including:

• What am I doing writing a book? I can't sit still for that long.
• The Pledge of Allegiance... with liberty and Starbucks for all.
• My Brother, Ron -- The good do die young and pricks do live forever.
• If there is a hell, it is modeled after junior high.
• The real world is just like high school, only there are more places to eat.
• The Post Office - Fuck you, Ben Franklin.
• Writing may just be an excuse to have the whole day to masturbate.
• College prepares you for the real world. Graduate school prepares you for an even realer world.

Now, lest you think I only read the chapter titles, here are a few quotations from the body of the book that I really liked:

• "...no child, ever, has said the words "under God" and experienced the rapture" (p. 15)

• "And I think that it takes a lot of balls for heterosexuals to make a fuss over this issue [gay marriage], considering 50 percent of us can't even stay married. It's not like we have a lock on this institution" (p. 30) - this reminds me of a point made by a friend of mine a few years ago. After watching "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?" he said, "Ya, and we are going to destroy the sanctity of marriage!

• "I had become really good at getting good grades - a skill you can learn without learning anything else at the same time." (p. 79) - that's a total frustration of mine... tests never seem to test what you've actually learned, just what you've memorized.

• "I still wonder how you can elect a leader of the free world who has never seen the world. For God's sake, the man never even made it to Canada. That's almost impossible. Even drunk on a bet you can make it to Canada." (p. 101)

• "Tech support is actually code for 'No one is here, no one has ever been here. We could give a shit. You didn't pay enough for this thing in the first place, and besides, it works by magic." (i. 136)

• "If you were a parent at that time, however, you had reason to count your blessings because, as part of the tax cut package, you would received a check from the feds for four hundred dollars for every child you had. Which really paid off for those couples that had, say, a thousand kids." (p. 169)

• "If curling is an Olympic sport, then oral sex is sex. And even if someone is bad at it, they should still get a fucking medal." (p. 175)

• "We were in the midst of an energy crisis and in order to conserve, the school would shut down for the month. This was 1975. And since then we have done nothing, I mean, squat, zilch, nada, to deal with our energy problems." (p.198) - Isn't that a little terrifying? I mean, that was before I was born! And I'm old!

• "And I went down to see the dean of students, with whom I'd already become enamored because he'd begun discussing the fact that they were thinking of throwing me out of school. I had a tendency to tell the faculty at every turn, in so many words, bascially that they were full of shit." (p. 199)

• Describing a scene in Houston, Texas: "It was a shocking epiphany... there, on one corner, was a Starbucks. A rather common sight, to be sure. But across the street in an office building that was a mirror image of the structure holding the Starbucks... stood another Starbucks.. At first I looked back and forth, convinced the sun was playing tricks on my eyes. I thought, let me lok at this Starbucks, and when I turn around, there couldn't possibly be a Starbucks behind me. After all, I reasoned, if there was a just and loving God, he certainly wouldn't allow this shit to happen." - Clearly, Lewis has not been to Vancouver, where this is a relatively common sight.

Labels: humour