Everything Hurts - Bill Scheft

Not my cuppa parodic self-help, this.  I am always futzy around 'funny' novels because a thing that tries to be funny and isn't is worse than a thing that is unintentionally funny (cough V C Andrews cough).  And this book has a very low jokes/jokes landed ratio, if only because it tries so very hard.

So.  Phil once wrote a jokey self-help book as a way of paying off his alimony but people took the book seriously and now he writes an allegedly amusing self-help column but also has random ass-pain that a completely different self-help guru has convinced him is all in his head.  Plus, troubles with women.  Plus, family angst.  And somewhere during the book he gets laid off.  This book has All Of The Things.

And the difficulty with writing a book about a professional funnyman is that when he's cracking wise he needs to crack hard, especially if everyone is going to LAUGH UPROARIOUSLY at him.  And there are definitely great lines, but maybe two-thirds of the book is one-liners, and maybe a third of those one-liners are genuinely funny and I'm not sure what a third of two-thirds is but it's not enough.  It's like Scheft takes all the jokes he can think of and throws them at the wall to see which ones will stick.  And then the ones that stick well, he peels off and throws again. 

There are moments not unfrequent when Phil (or his brother Jim, or his pseudo-girlfriend Janet) will say A Thing That Makes Everyone Laugh and I go back and re-read it and not only is it an unfunny joke, but I can't even tell where the joke is supposed to be.  Like it's an inside-joke between the characters but the earlier bit where the inside joke is shared with you the reader got edited out, and no one noticed.

And then there's this:

By which I mean about four-fifths of the way through this jokey novel Scheft takes a hard left towards Nicholas Sparks and then everything is heartwarming.  Phil and Janet are suddenly engaged, his brother never hated him all along, his niece is not actually his daughter *phew*.  And then about eight pages from the end the focalization shifts to Phil's brother, whose head we have decisively not been in for the entirety of the novel, and hangs out there for a page or so.  It is...jarring.

It's not horrible.  As a book it's fairly ok.  But I feel like Scheft is a funny guy who had ass-pain one time and thought it would make a great novel, when it should probably have been a great memoir.  Or a bar story.

Six caterpillars.

Requisite ass-covering: book received from publisher.