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I Am America (And So Can You) by Stephen Colbert
If you liked Jon Stewart’s 2004 book, America, you will like this one.
Chapter titles are loaded, but fantastic (“The Family,” “Religion,” “The Media,” “Race”) and in each he offers his commentary on each of them. “You won’t find these opinions in any textbook,” he says, “unless it happens to be one I’ve defaced.”
I thought footnotes in academic essays were bad, but Stephen Colbert lays the internal monologues in the margins on thick. Too thick. They function like his Wørd segments on The Colbert Report do, but we only get one of those an episode. Image three or four on a page? A little much. At times I resented when I was about to turn the page, just because I knew I would have to read his marginal ideas (both location and imagination). At first they were funny, but then they felt forced.
Hilarious non sequiturs abound: on why environmentalism is bad, Colbert asserts that "Jesus hasn't forgiven you for that Cross, trees," while an aside about why kegel exercises are evil is just about the funniest thing I've ever read. But not everything is a home run; a page devoted to photos of dog testicles (and a lone human example) is just creepy, and nowhere near as funny as the spread in "America: the Book" of the Supreme Court Justices in the nude that it is clearly trying to rival.
This is an uber-entertaining, very random look at contemporary America, chock-full of Colbert’s remedies for our issues. Perfect bathroom read.
- by Mary Mercury |
