Tag Archives: comedy

Out of the Soylent Planet by Robert Kroese

“You know what’s good for adventures,” asked Rex Nihilo, apparently sensing an opportunity to make a sale. “Malarchian military grade plastic explosives. I’ve got a whole hovertruck load.”

“We don’t need any explosives,” said Uncle Blauwin.

The boy looked like he was going to cry. “First you won’t let me go into town to get energy fluxors and now you won’t let me have any military grade explosives. I hate you and this gosh-darned desert planet!”

Communication is about context, and comedy is about context, which means all communication is comedy. That, kids, is logic.

In this prequel to the sci-fi comedy Starship Grifters, if you’re familiar with a general sci-fi context, you’ll get the jokes–the more familiar, the more jokes. Mm, the smell of logic just gets you in the eye, doesn’t it?

A few years ago, I blogged on the second book in this series, Aye, Robot, and I found Out of the Soylent Planet to be a funnier story. The con man Rex Nihilo attempts to unload a truckload of plastic explosives, fails, rolls to plan B, fails, and then finds himself unloaded onto an isolated planet that’s locked down so tight even cans of creamed corn are contraband. The planet is mostly barren. Its civilization is built around producing an artificial nutritional substance called Slop. “It’s not food. It’s Slop!” Since readers would be thinking Slop is made from people, our heroes come across a corporate video that neatly explains that rumor away.

Rex and his robotic Girl Friday, SASHA, go through several silly romps and clever escapes. And explosions. Lots of explosions. Good fun.

I listened to the J.D. Ledford audiobook version, which added to the comedy with good timing and particular word emphases. I laughed aloud many times.

Dark Comedic Mystery “City of Angles”

You’ve been devoted to the Church. As you know, we like to say that we don’t have followers. We have lenders. You give us your love and passion devotion, and we’re obligated to pay back the debt.”

Lars reviewed Jonathan Leaf’s debut novel, City of Angles, earlier, and with it being a mystery novel, that’s about as much of the plot as you’ll want to know before reading. What you don’t get from reviews is the style of humor Leaf employs.

[Disclaimer: I picked up the novel in response to the author’s request, having seen a friend’s referral days before.]

City of Angles isn’t a dark story. It’s standard fare for a character-driven murder mystery, and from almost every character you read something like the quotation above: “We don’t have followers. We have lenders.” Also from this same church context, we get this: “Selva had attained the status of FUP. This mean a fully unrepressed person. Those who opposed the Church were EMEs, or enemies of man’s emergence.” An FUP. That’ll catch on.

This actually rings true with my experience, in that some folks like to make acronyms and others like to use terms, and the Church of Life in this story resembles Scientology, which is probably just as debauched and oppressive as the Church is depicted. But in a way, everyone in this novel is debauched. Everyone is friendly, while it serves their purpose, and they drink sexual allure from the tap. Everything they can control they will try to control. And when a character finds himself at a dead end with all of his plans disassembled, he tells himself all PR is good PR and begins to wonder if he can sell his story. Even the cops are thinking this next thing could be their big break.

I enjoyed reading this book and look forward to Leaf’s success with it.

Buster Keaton – The Art of the Gag

I’ve got a little translating work today, which puts me behind in my reading. So instead of a book review, here’s an analysis of another kind of storytelling — a video on Buster Keaton’s comedy film techniques. I’m a huge fan of Keaton. In my world, Charlie Chaplin is nowhere.

Trick or Treat Tongue Twisters

With 600 million pounds of candy sold for Halloween, it seems we’ve given up the tricks in favor of the treats. Here are a couple tongue twister skits from Studio C to sooth your appetite for trickery.

The goal in each skit is a perfect run-through. One flub sends them back to the beginning.

Dana’s Dead (Oct. 2012)

Sam Sloan (Oct 2015)

Comedy in Midst of Coronavirus

This bit, called “The Funniest Sketch in the History of Sketch Comedy” by our friend Anthony Sacramone, is not a bit that could fly in our current day of keeping our distance and staying home to avoid infection. Happier days. Enjoy!

Original Prin: Canadian Writes Real Laugher

Micah Mattix praises Randy Boyagoda’s Original Prin as a terrifically funny religious satire. In it a small liberal arts college, newly named University of the Family Universal, needs more money to keep treading water, so a specialist is hired to uncover their options. She offers them two options: “sell UFU’s buildings to a Chinese developer to transform into an assisted living care facility where the professors would provide ‘stress free’ workshops to residents, or take money from the university-less country of Dragomans in exchange for providing online classes and degrees to its citizens.”

Someone will have to ferret out these options to see which one is better. Enter our hero, Professor Prin, who specializes in seahorses in Canadian literature.

Read Mattix’s review for better feel for the comedy what looks like good and proper skewering of some of our institutions.

Scott Sterling, Comic gold

Witness comic genius in these two skits about the epic Yale athlete Scott Sterling and his ability to block the ball. The first video featuring soccer penalty kicks came out in 2014 (though before this weekend I thought it was much older than that). It’s one of the funniest videos of the decades, only made better by the follow-up volleyball video released in 2016. The execution and pacing of these videos sells the comedy marvelously.

The unstoppable Scott Sterling, soccer goalie
The unstoppable Scott Sterling, volleyball team captain

Like the man said, when Armageddon comes I want to be in a bunker made of that man’s face.

62 Novels Judged Not Funny Enough for Wodehouse Prize

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize is the United Kingdom’s only literary award for comic writing. Last year, it went to Bridget Jones’s Baby by Helen Fielding.  Two works tied for the prize in 2016, The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray and The Improbability of Love by Hannah Rothschild. I believe we mentioned these works and the Alexander McCall Smith’s 2015 win earlier in this space.

But the 62 novels submitted for consideration this year were only funny enough to produce “many a wry smile,” not the “unanimous, abundant laughter” the judges were hoping to have.

Judge and publisher David Campbell said, “We look forward to awarding a larger rollover prize next year to a hilariously funny book.”

“There were a lot of witty submissions, bloody good novels, but they weren’t comic novels. The alchemy was not there.” (via Prufrock News)

via GIPHY

Redshirts by John Scalzi

via GIPHY Warning posted: “Watch for Exploding Rocks.”

It’s a common sci-fi truism that the guy wearing a red shirt on a new away team mission will be killed. Of the original Star Trek series, Wikipedia reports, “59 crew members killed in the series,” of which “43 (73%) were wearing red shirts.” John Scalzi asks, what if those were actual lives in a galaxy far, far away?

In his comic novel, Redshirts, Scalzi spins the tale of several minor crewmen on the Universal Union flagship Intrepid who start to ask why their teammates act strangely when senior officers are looking for away team members. One guy who has hidden himself in the bowels of the ship has a crazy theory, but when none of the sane theories pan out, you go with the crazy one.

It’s a funny book, but I didn’t start laughing until at least halfway through it, and the ending parts stretched my patience almost to the point of putting it down unfinished. There’s a point when that weird joke has been explained enough and going over it again will just kill it. Unfortunately, this joke gets run over a dozen times. But there are sweet moments in those ending parts that may be worth reading, if you’re into that sort of thing. Heh.

Whose Book Is Funniest in UK?

The short list for this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction has been released. The winner of this UK literary award  will be announced next month, just prior to the Hay Festival in Wales.  The winner “will receive a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année and the complete set of the Everyman Wodehouse collection. They will also be presented with a locally-bred Gloucestershire Old Spot pig, which will be named after the winning novel.”

Last year’s prize went to two authors, Hannah Rothschild for The Improbability of Love and Paul Murray for The Mark and the Void. In 2015, Alexander McCall Smith won the prize for Fatty O’Leary’s Dinner Party. (See this article for a photo of the prize pig.)

“It was impossible to separate these two books, because they made us laugh so much. And between them they produce a surfeit of wild satire and piercing humour about the subject that can always make us laugh and cry. Money,” judge and broadcaster James Naughtie told The Guardian.