[.ca] Coyote Vs Acme (ISBN 0312420587)

From Amazon.com:
Ian Frazier collects some of his funniest essays from The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthlyin Coyote v. Acme. Setting the tone is the title piece, consisting of the legal brief filed on behalf of the hapless character who has been irreparably harmed by manufacturer's negligence while pursuing the Road Runner. An excerpt: "As Mr. Coyote gripped the handlebars, the Rocket Sled accelerated with such sudden and precipitate force as to stretch Mr. Coyote's forelimbs to a length of fifty feet." Throughout the nearly two-dozen essays, Frazier demonstrates his remarkable gift for language: he parodies everything from New Yorkers' talent for "getting in people's faces," to the IRS (while using some actual government-issued verbiage), and he mixes the classic with the less-than-classic in Boswell's Life of Don Johnson.

Humor on the level of TV commercials is right:
I'm talking about this book. Not me. Other reviewers (see directly below me) have implied -- no, declared -- that if you give this book lukewarm reviews, you have no sense of humor. I have found that if, for example, you think Woody Allen's 3 books are hilarious, you will be greatly disappointed by this book. If you think that "Where's the beef?" line was hilarious, you may or may not be disappointed by this book. I don't really know. I always change the channel when commercials come on. What I do know is that this book contains 2 very funny pieces: "Stalin's Chuckle" and "Child of War." And one embarrassingly bad one: "The Afternoon of June 8, 1991." The ones in between I will leave for all those TV people to judge. The ones who have such apparently bad senses of humor....but who am I -- or more importantly, the reviewer below me -- to judge other peoples' senses of humor. If you laugh, then you laugh, there's nothing right or wrong about it. Jeesh.

Weird as all hell, but...:
How many things can you say about this book? Until I got around to reading Fight Club, this was easily the strangest book I'd ever read. The title essay is pretty fun (if skewering the conventions of things like legalese makes you laugh; it works for me) but the real humor in the book comes from stretching things to their logical extremes. Where Frazier does that, it's funny. Where he doesn't, it often doesn't quite work (previously mentioned was the Satanist university president, an essay that fails to make sense even in Frazier's cockeyed world view). So we see the traumatic aftereffects of the cancellation of one of the better-known classic sitcoms, part of La Femme Nikita's tax return, the concerns of a life insurance agency that deals with soap opera characters, and the comparison of a woman's laugh to brandy by firelight (really impossible to explain without reading it). There is also juxtaposition of extreme ideas; We see bank bureaucracy not merely run amok but deliberately driven off the rails. We see a mild-mannered Great Gatsby-ish short story suddenly invaded by a German Panzergruppe. We see the poetry of Don Johnson. We see a Martha Stewart-type character named Elsa disposing of incriminating evidence. This is an excellent book, but with one caveat: it simply is not going to appeal to everyone, no matter how someone might try to sell it. Mr. Frazier's work here reflects a sense of the surreal more extreme than Monty Python, up in the range of Andy Kaufman or Emo Phillips, and that sort of edgy comedy makes your brain hurt. I like it, though.

Short, Sweet, but Mainly Funny:
Ian Frazier's Coyote v. Acme will not please everyone as the humour is not always accessible but when it clicks, it clicks with a sweet, funny vengence. I did not understand all the humour but could surprisingly even enjoy the whimsy of the essays that were swimming just a little above my head. And each small essay is short enough to either get or not get and then move on to the next one. In a short space of time there should something of great humour for the reader and, often, many things. Because of the rather esoteric style of the humour, the book even stands up to repeated readings, something that is very rare in a book of humour.

A title for my review:
This is an extremely funny book. Funny, funny, funny. If you look up funny in the dictionary you will find this definition: seeking or intended to amuse. Nothing could better describe this book. It seeks...

A Few Gems...:
This collection of twenty-two short humorous essays culled from The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthy is worth a quick glance on the strength of a few of the essays, but don't be tricked by the clever title or jacket into actually buying the book. The laugh-out-loud essays are: "Boswell's Life of Don Johnson," which satirizes Thomas Boswell's famous biography of the poet, "The Life of Samuel Johnson;" "Coyote v. Acme," which is a legal document outlining Wile E. Coyote's (of cartoon fame) lawsuit against the Acme Corporation; and "Thanks For the Memory." Each of these is based on a lone brilliant idea, quickly and artfully rendered before it gets too stale.