Comedy Archives — Keeping Up With The Penguins

How To Kill Your Family – Bella Mackie

May 5, 2026 / Sheree / 1 Comment

How To Kill Your Family has the perfect tagline: “They say you can’t choose your family… but you can kill them.” Yes, it’s another novel with a title that might raise a few eyebrows, but the delightfully dark contents don’t disappoint.

The story is narrated from Limehouse Prison by Grace Bernard, the “Morton Murderer”. She’s been convicted of a murder she didn’t commit, but – as her hand-written prison memoir reveals – she got away with several more that she most certainly did.

She’s been planning these murders since she was a teenager, in the hopes of avenging her mother (who died when Grace was 13). Grace is the illegitimate love child of a ridiculously wealthy businessman who has refused to contribute to her upbringing – or even acknowledge her existence. In fact, his whole family disavowed her and her mother, leaving them to live in relative poverty while they enjoyed mansions and yachts and holidays in Spain. So, Grace dispatches them, one by one, leaving her father for last to really maximise his suffering.

She executes these murders carefully, spacing them out and varying the means enough to avoid suspicion – they look more like a run of bad luck for the family more than a targeted vengeance plot. She describes her crimes in great detail, explaining to the reader exactly how she lined up the dominoes to fall just as she’d planned – so, how did she wind up in prison, wrongfully convicted no less?

Needless to say, Grace is hilariously dark and bitter. She’s no Lady Macbeth, driven mad by guilt and grief – she’s calm, cool, and collected the whole way through. This makes How To Kill Your Family a highly entertaining read. You’ve got to admire a woman who can anonymously manipulate a teenage boy into hacking her father’s smart house to kill his wife by overheating the sauna, and make you laugh while describing in great detail how she did it.

Of course, it helps that there is a deeply satisfying schadenfreude in watching the overly privileged upper echelons get what’s coming to them, taken down by an amateur vigilante with very little to lose. Sure, it’s a bit gruesome, but the wry tone (and the jaw-dropping lack of self-awareness on Grace’s part) make it not just palatable, but delectable. Grace is snarky and sardonic and clever enough to get away with murder, but has absolutely no idea that she wields the kind of privilege and snobbery she rails against.

There’s a strange (and, I’ll admit, pretty unexpected) left turn in the final chapters of How To Kill Your Family, but I think it helps Mackie wrap up the story in a way that feels satisfying… ish. There’s a point to it, I guess, is what I’m saying. Plus, on reflection I realised there are subtle hints to it early on, if you know to look for them – always the sign of a clever mystery. I highly recommend How To Kill Your Family if you’re feeling some rage and you want to live vicariously through a killer who finds the most outrageous ways possible to blow off steam.

Read How To Kill Your Family on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of How To Kill Your Family:

“Honestly, if I’m going to spend time with awful people, I prefer it to be irl… I’d recommend skipping this one unless you love stories populated by irritating people you’d kinda like to trip while walking done a flight of stairs.” FanGirl
“Way too much self-reflection by the main character.” – Jeff
“I raised my daughter as a single Mom. There is no way she would have killed her father, his three wives and her 9 living half-siblings. Not that her father was rich far from it.” – Rebecka Vigus
“allegedly there’s a 2 book deal and I can only hope the second is a sequel to this. As it is, this book leaves you frustrated like good sex that abruptly ends with you getting kicked unceremoniously out of bed sans orgasm. Can’t in good conscience recommend this unfulfilling experience.” – Blair
“The main character would not shut up. Just trauma-dumping and over-explaining every irrelevant detail like we asked. Babes, I don’t need to know what the wallpaper looked like in 4K.” – Kate

Pride And Prejudice And Zombies – Seth Grahame-Smith

February 11, 2025 / Sheree / 0 Comments

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I love a book that does exactly what it says on the tin. That’s what we get with Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, a 2009 parody novel that combines Jane Austen’s classic 1813 romance with (you guessed it!) zombies.

The idea came from Quirk Books editor Jason Rekaluk, who looked at two unlikely lists (‘fanboy’ characters like pirates and ninjas and public domain books such as Crime And Punishment and Wuthering Heights) side-by-side. He ran the idea by Seth Grahame-Smith, who found himself captivated by the idea of Elizabeth Bennet as a highly trained zombie-slayer, and her love story with Mr Darcy playing out against a backdrop of ultraviolent zombie mayhem. According to him, the original text was “well suited” to adaptation into a zombie horror story.

The opening line of Pride And Prejudice And Zombies really sets the tone: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” The reader is catapulted into a version of 19th century England where a zombie plague has spread across the country, and Mrs Bennet is trying to find good husbands for her five daughters. The Bennet sisters attend balls, where they dance and occasionally kill off hoards of zombies trying to eat the brains of guests. When Jane is taken ill at Netherfield, there’s some concern that she may have fallen victim to the scourge – luckily, it’s just a cold after all, and she makes a full recovery. You get the idea.

There are a few clunky moments in Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, naturally, but overall the zombies are woven in far more smoothly than you might expect. I particularly enjoyed the expansion of Lady Catherine de Bourgh as a notorious highly-skilled zombie assassin, and found it totally believable.

Poor Charlotte Lucas fares even worse in this version than she does in Jane Austen’s original text. Not only does she still have to marry the loathsome Mr Collins, but she’s bitten by a zombie and gradually succumbs to the plague (before having her head chopped off and her body burned, as is apparently the custom).

Wickham also comes a cropper: in addition to having to marry Lydia after unceremoniously taking her virginity, Mr Darcy beats him senseless and he is left quadriplegic. Pretty much every reference to him from that point on ends with him soiling himself (and I must say, I think Grahame-Smith went a little too hard on that point – continence issues aren’t a deep well for punchlines).

Ultimately, Pride And Prejudice And Zombies is a good, silly parody to read for fun. I think anyone who tries to read it Academically(TM) and give clever hot takes about its commentary on gender roles in Austen’s oeuvre, or the symbolism of zombies in the marriage plot, is just trying too hard. Relax and enjoy it for what it is: a Regency romance occasionally interrupted by a zombie desperately seeking brains.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Pride And Prejudice And Zombies:

“Poorly done. The movie was awful and it was better than this book.” – EB
“He could have raped Austens novell with reptiloids, werewolves or aliens or whatosever out of the shock box instead -the result would have been equally silly, dump and senseless.” – Typhon
“The zombies play no easily discernible role in the plot, and seem to have been added for the sole purpose of marketing. Far better, then, to simply read _Pride and Prejudice_, and imagine zombies in it as you see fit.” – Ethan Wells
“I expected this to be funny book. It is boring. I had more fun starring at the wall.” –
Dagny Kurdwanowska
“Were it possible to rate it with negative stars I would gladly subtract all of them until the skies went dark… It is a poor parody of Pride and Prejudice and sadly blinds Austen’s satirical eye and can therefore be considered the literary equivalent of glaucoma. How anyone thought it would be a good idea to write this novel defies logic. To do so by inserting uninspired prose into a brilliant author’s work merely eviscerates a classic not satirizes it. Then by some unlikely twist of fate the author managed to find an unconscionable publisher who lacked enough sense and sensibility to publish it. Jane Austen he isn’t – with any luck she will return from the dead and eat his brain.” – Anon

Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows – Balli Kaur Jaswal

April 23, 2024 / Sheree / 0 Comments

If the title of Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows doesn’t catch your eye, I don’t know how to help you. Knowing nothing else about this book, I knew I had to read it. Somehow, the title raises a bunch of questions, but at the same time it does exactly what it says on the tin. Brilliant!

If I had to sum up the thesis of Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, I’d say it’s: every woman has a hidden life, and every community has things they don’t talk about. Sometimes, those secrets collide.

Nikki is a twenty-something woman living in London, straddling the worlds of her immigrant parents and her modern contemporaries. She’s a bit directionless (as twenty-somethings tend to be), having dropped out of law school to ‘find her passion’. That search has taken her to a small apartment above a pub where she works a few nights each week, much to her family’s chagrin.

Nikki’s sister has chosen a different path: a respectable profession (nursing) and entering into the marriage market. She asks Nikki to post an ad on a Southall temple message board for young people seeking arranged marriages, and there Nikki finds an intriguing ad of her own. The Sikh Community Association is seeking a creative writing teacher to teach story writing to women – and Nikki, out of curiosity more than anything, takes the job.

But this is Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, so I’m sure you can guess that the storytelling workshop doesn’t work out exactly the way Nikki expects. The proper Sikh widows who attend the class are barely literate, and they’re expecting to learn the English alphabet and grammar, not narrative perspective and literary style. They soon discover, thanks to a gag gift they discover on Nikki’s desk, the world of erotic stories, and realise they’d have a lot more fun telling their own than learning their ABCs.

The erotic stories these Punjabi widows tell aren’t just wink-wink euphemistically sexy – they’re straight up spicy. It turns out these women are hiding a lot under their white dupattas. As the women delve deeper into their fantasies and the radical act of openly communicating their desires, Nikki grows concerned about the community’s reaction to her classes – specifically the Brotherhood, the young men who style themselves as the ‘moral police’.

The title of Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows might mislead some readers (it misled me, I’m not too proud to admit it) into thinking this is purely a comedic novel, an older-women-behaving-badly romp with lots of literal lols. It’s definitely entertaining, but it’s also meaningful, and there’s a lot of depth to it if you’re reading it as a feminist text. It’s a book about how women experience and express desire in cultures that are policed by men. It’s about sexuality as a source of confidence, both in and out of the bedroom. And it’s about the power to determine one’s own life, and pursue one’s own happiness.

I particularly appreciated the diversity of the arranged marriages depicted in Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows – both how they happen, and how they turn out. For a long time, the dominant Anglo narrative about arranged marriages was that they were universally awful (especially for women), and shackled two people together for life, site unseen, simply because their parents said so. Then, as far as I can see, there was a bit of an over-correction, and we had a run of stories about modern arranged marriages that worked perfectly because the couple fell in love for real. In Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, there are both very traditional arranged marriages and more contemporary and flexible arranged marriages, ones that work well and ones that don’t. More diversity in our perspective and understanding can only be a good thing, and this book definitely contributes to that.

Reese Witherspoon picked Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows for her reading list in 2018, and it’s easy to see why. As she said, it’s “a mystery, a romance, a family drama… and yes it’s 🔥 🔥 🔥!” – total Reese catnip.

Read Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows:

“too raunchy to be interesting” – M. Edwards
“just silly. misleading title to entice buying.” – KAVANJIT SINGH
“The book had romance and murder! Would recommend” – sam
“The so called “Erotic Stories” didn’t blow my skirt up.” – I Can Tell

Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls – David Sedaris

April 16, 2024 / Sheree / 2 Comments

Every David Sedaris book is like a treat for me. I hoard them like chocolates in a secret corner of the fridge, and pull them out when I need something sinful and delicious. My latest indulgence is Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls, his collection of narrative essays from 2013.

It won’t come as any surprise to fellow fans of Sedaris that Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls contains very little about the titular diabetes, or owls. The title was taken from a conversation he had with a reader at a book signing, who asked him to inscribe one of his books with something along the lines of ‘explore your inner feelings’. Sedaris said: “I never write what people ask me, so I said ‘I’ll keep the word explore’, and I wrote ‘let’s explore diabetes with owls,’.” There you have it.

The essays in Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls aren’t closely tied to a particular theme or servicing any overarching narrative. Rather, there’s a few threads that loosely connect a few of them, more like a mind map than a straight line through a story.

Sedaris’s voice remains as singular as ever, though – curious, awkward, wry, self-deprecating, at times angry, mostly baffled. He waxes rhapsodic about his relationship with his French orthodontist, he overcomes his fear to hand-feed a kookaburra at a regional Australian cafe, he grumbles about the futile but irresistible task of cleaning rubbish from the English countryside, and he wonders what exactly it is about him that gives a taxidermy shop attendant the (correct) impression that he’d like to see human remains they keep out the back.

A couple of motifs appear multiple times throughout. Many of the essays in Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls were written or set during the early Obama years, for instance, so quite a few of them reference the 2008 election and the world’s fascination with the American political side-show. Sedaris’s father is also a recurring character, at times an menacing presence in the family home and at others an object of fun. Any other writer might struggle to communicate to the reader that a man who rarely wears pants inside the house can intimidate a child, but Sedaris isn’t just any writer. Without ever explaining it explicitly, Sedaris impresses upon us his lifelong struggle to satisfy his father – only to delightfully resolve the tension by finally conceding to his father’s demands that he get a colonoscopy, which makes the old man happy.

My love for Sedaris is so great that even the cruelest subject matter doesn’t put me off his writing. In Loggerheads, he describes a disastrous childhood experiment keeping captured baby sea turtles in a bedroom aquarium, despite knowing nothing about them (not even what they ate). The sea turtles met an unfortunate end, which would be enough to put me off any other essayist, but Sedaris has engendered enough goodwill that I can forgive it.

In that vein, delicate readers might be put out by some of what I’d diplomatically refer to as some cultural insensitivity in Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls – in the chapter about examining a taxidermied Congolese Pygmy for instance, or the one about food and hygiene habits in China. It’s dicey ground, but I like to assume the best of intentions in Sedaris and I hope that other readers can do the same.

Really, the slightly sour note in Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls was a layout issue more than anything else. Sedaris includes comedic fictional monologues throughout the collection, which he explains in the foreword, but they’re not flagged as such in text. So, reading Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls led to frequent experiences of whiplash, realising that Sedaris was writing in character and not, in fact, relating a story about being a teenage girl who gets ripped off on a school trip to England or a woman who is duped by her gay son into wearing a Big Proud Dyke t-shirt to a conservative rally. These stories are funny, and no doubt fun for Sedaris to write, but I could’ve done without them – or at least would have preferred they be signposted a bit better.

All told, reading Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls was another wicked delight, and I’m already eagerly anticipating my next treat from Sedaris.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls:

“A turd left floating in a toilet is far funnier than one mans take on politics in the US.” – amlphx
“As a resident of the south who got to go to one of his book signings it now makes me re-evaluate whether or not he actually wanted to be there or secretly was hating our guts cause we might be conservative.” – Amazon Customer
“Do you really want to read about the taxidermist who used a human head as his subject, for example, or about his sisters’ reactions to some pervert exposing himself? In two words, this book is childish trash.” – Spot
“Too mean-spirited and kind of snobby and elitist – like this guy has the monopoly on good taste. Get over yourself.” – Anonymous
“Reading this was like going to your favorite restaurant, ordering a lobster and having the waiter lift the lid of the serving dish to reveal a dead rat. I tried three time to read this mound of steaming crap.” – Tom Hemeon

Heartburn – Nora Ephron

December 19, 2023 / Sheree / 0 Comments

The blurb for Heartburn poses an interesting question: “Is it possible to write a side-splitting novel about the breakup of the perfect marriage?” It would appear that the answer is yes – as long as you’re queen of the ’90s rom-com, Nora Ephron.

Heartburn is an autobiographical novel about heartbreak, food, marriage, sex, pregnancy, Judaism, therapy, and anger – and it’s only 178 pages long. Ephron based the novel on her marriage to and divorce from her second husband, Carl Berstein. You can thank your lucky stars every day that you’re not Carl – he fucked around, and Ephron made sure that he found out.

If I had to sum up the vibe, I’d say Heartburn is like Julie & Julia meets Olivia Rodrigo’s Get Him Back. The main character, Rachel (Ephron’s avatar), is a Jewish food writer from New York, transplanted to Washington D.C. to support her husband’s career as a political journalist. When the story starts, they have one child and another on the way – and that’s the moment he chooses to kick off an affair, with glamorous socialite Thelma Rice.

Rachel’s first response is to spread a rumour on the Washington grapevine that Thelma has a venereal disease. Good for her!

Her second, once it becomes clear that her husband has no intention of wrapping up the affair and getting on with their lives together, is to take the kid and the bun in the oven and run back to New York. She goes back to group therapy, she reflects on her favourite recipes, she flirts with the idea of finding a new lover. Her behaviour is a little unhinged but, honestly, who could blame her?

Reading Heartburn, I instantly recognised some iconic Ephron lines that made their way into her film (one of my favourites) When Harry Met Sally. “Pesto is the quiche of the seventies,” for instance, and “What did she look like? / Thin. Pretty. Big tits. Your basic nightmare.” I respect that Ephron clearly knew when she’d struck gold and had no compunction about recycling content.

It’s impossible to separate Heartburn from Ephron’s real-life experience of being cheated on while heavily pregnant – and she wouldn’t want us to. It’s an explicit act of literary revenge, catharsis through thinly-veiled fiction. The fact that she doesn’t try to hide it or deny it is what makes it work.

One of the things I’m proudest of is that I managed to convert an event that seemed to me hideously tragic at the time to a comedy – and if that’s not fiction, I don’t know what is.
Nora Ephron on Heartburn

As good as Heartburn is, though, I can concede that Ephron’s novels weren’t her strongest work. Her comedy and insight into the human condition translates best on the big screen, in classic screenplays like the aforementioned When Harry Met Sally (and, indeed, the adaptation of Heartburn itself). Ephron didn’t write another novel after Heartburn, and while nothing she could have written could have possibly been bad, I’m glad she directed her energies to where they were most needed and appreciated.

This is definitely the best novel to buy for your bestie who’s going through a bad break-up; either they’ll find it hilariously relatable, or it will simply remind them that there’s light at the end of the tunnel and, someday, they’ll look back on it all and laugh.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Heartburn:

“This book is TERRIBLE! The main character rolls around in self pity while trying to cook the weirdest things.” – Big Mama
“I read about 50 pages before deciding to put myself out of this books misery.” – R. Peterson
“Waste of time. All about her divorce, a real downer.” – Swissneva
“Lots of whining, with recipes.” T. B.
“Back then it was like ‘wow’ she really wrote this? Reading it now, it is embarrassing and not politically correct. The book doesn’t hold up over the years. Kind of like Nora Ephron’s neck.” J. C.