Comedy Archives — Keeping Up With The Penguins

If The Shoe Fits – Julie Murphy

May 2, 2023 / Sheree / 2 Comments

Millennial readers occupy a strange middle ground, where they’re old enough to see the problems in the Disney stories of their youth, but young enough to feel the nostalgic pull of magical romances and whimsical stories. That’s how the Meant To Be series came about – books that reimagine classic Disney stories for a newly adult audience. The first book in the series is If The Shoe Fits, an escapist rom-com styled after Cinderella.

In this version of the fairytale love story, Cindy is a recent fashion grad and a shoe aficionado. Adrift after barely scraping through her last year of study, and her father’s death, she moves from New York to Los Angeles to live with her step-family.

Now, in In The Shoe Fits, the step-mother and -sisters aren’t evil – they’re just very LA. Erica is an executive producer of the blockbuster hit reality TV show Before Midnight, and her two daughters are budding Instagram influencers. Murphy managed to depict the natural discordance of a blended family without making the bonus members irredeemable villains. Maybe it departs a bit too much from the original story for some folks, but I loved it.

Anyway, Cindy moves to LA with the intention of nannying for her step-mother’s youngest children, but stumbles into a spot on Before Midnight instead. It’s basically The Bachelor, with a few fairytale-themed twists. Cindy’s not expecting to find love – when does the plus-sized contestant ever get the prince? – but she’s hoping to at least jump-start her fashion career.

Ah, yes, the prince: Henry, heir to a crumbling fashion empire (conveniently enough), and appearing on Before Midnight as a last-ditch effort to revitalise his mothers flagging brand. He’s not expecting to find love on the show either, but strangely enough, he and Cindy share a special connection – one that’s going to cause a lot of problems for the reality show’s narrative.

It’s a nice love story, yes, but I found the relationships between the contestants, and with their producers, the most interesting part of If The Shoe Fits. It was really wonderful to read a romance novel with more going on than pining and miscommunication. Plus, the representation – a plus-sized heroine, queer characters – gets a big tick.

Murphy also reimagines the “happily ever after” for If The Shoe Fits, serving up an ending that allows the heroine a lot more self-determination and agency. Snaps for that!

On the downside, though, If The Shoe Fits is a closed door romance (boo!), with nary more than a passionate kiss and a few butterflies – no doubt to satisfy the puritanical standards of the Disney overlords. I also found it a little hard to follow at times; some of the scenes flew by so quickly, I had to double back to make sure I caught everything before forging on.

All told, it’s a sweet romance with a nostalgic vibe, probably a good pick for fans of UnReal (I’m guessing, I only ever saw half of the pilot episode) and people with fond memories of watching Disney’s Cinderella as a kid. If you get a kick out of hate-watching The Bachelor and critiquing the patriarchal messaging, you’ll probably enjoy it, too. If The Shoe Fits is a promising start to the Meant To Be series, and I’m looking forward to checking out the next installments (By The Book by Jasmine Guillory is already out, and Kiss The Girl by Zoraida Córdova is coming soon).

My favourite Amazon reviews of If The Shoe Fits:

“felt like if a hallmark movie was written with an agenda, that was more important than the romance” – NeverAgain
“I liked that the beauty queen/skinny girl did not win.” – Jennifer
“IT ISN’T A MODERN DAY CINDERELLA! It’s a bad rip off of a season of The Bachelor.” – Terri Hansen

When You Are Engulfed In Flames – David Sedaris

March 21, 2023 / Sheree / 0 Comments

I treat myself to one David Sedaris book a year (otherwise, I’d gobble them all up at once like a greedy little goblin). This year, I went for When You Are Engulfed In Flames, his sixth essay collection first published in 2008. As per the blurb: “Subjects include a parasitic worm that once lived in his mother-in-law’s leg, an encounter with a dingo, and the recreational use of an external catheter. Also recounted is the buying of a human skeleton and the author’s attempt to quit smoking.”

Yes, of course, When You Are Engulfed In Flames contains twenty-two essays as hilarious and ridiculous as we’ve come to expect from Sedaris. Other subjects include the time he joined his brother for a drug deal in a North Carolina trailer home, karmic retribution on rude plane passengers, his husband lancing a boil on his tailbone, and befriending a French local only to find out he was a child abuser.

There’s less about his family in this collection than in others I’ve read so far. It’s disappointing, if only because his family seems a veritable goldmine of comic fodder (I have a particularly soft spot for his foul-mouthed brother). But When You Are Engulfed In Flames isn’t lacking in comic characters, even if they’re not related to Sedaris. I saw another review refer to them as a “new crop of lunatics”, which is spot on.

My personal favourite in the collection – one that gave me many, many literal lols – is That’s Amore, an essay about/profile of Sedaris’s New York neighbour, Helen. She hates everyone, believes herself to be the center of the universe, and sounds like an absolute nightmare to live next to (if incredibly funny to read about). Sedaris attributes to her endless hysterical non sequiturs, including “I shit so hard, I think I sprained my asshole”.

(Heads up: there’s a few uncensored slurs scattered here and there throughout When You Are Engulfed In Flames. Normally, it wouldn’t warrant a mention, but I’ve noticed an uptick on readers looking for content warnings before they pick up a book – so, there you have it.)

The final story in When You Are Engulfed In Flames – The Smoking Section – is remarkably long, much longer than any other essay I’ve read by Sedaris. He recounts, diary-style, his attempt to quit smoking by moving to Tokyo for six months (yes, that sounds insane, but in Sedaris’s world it makes perfect sense). The story is good – not quite as good as his very best, but still good by any benchmark – even if it does read more like An American In Tokyo, and make me crave a cigarette myself.

My dog, Fyodor Dogstoyevsky, doesn’t care for David Sedaris – because the books make me laugh out loud so hard and so often, his nap time is frequently disturbed. Even though When You Are Engulfed In Flames isn’t my favourite of his collections I’ve read so far – and probably not one I’d recommend to first-time Sedaris readers – it’s still great. I’m still in awe of the way Sedaris can craft a story out of seemingly nothing at all. I’d dearly love to share a cocktail and a smoke with him (if he hadn’t, as The Smoking Section suggests, sadly quit both alcohol and cigarettes).

Read my reviews of Sedaris’s other books here:

My favourite Amazon reviews of When You Are Engulfed In Flames:

“I laughed out loud more reading this book than I have in my day to day life since childhood.” – aprillaman
“He is a breath of fres air for this busy weiry lady suffocated by every day stressers.” – Elizabeth Carver
“I felt like I was sitting next to a guy on the plane who tried really hard to make me laugh, waving his arms in my face telling crude exaggerated stories. I sat stone faced for 30 minute chance before I told him, “Enough.”” – R Hilux

Horrorstor – Grady Hendrix

October 18, 2022 / Sheree / 4 Comments

Setting aside any regards for its contents, Horrorstor gets five stars for book design, alone. Look at it! It’s formatted to look like an IKEA catalogue, complete with an order form for a copyright page and product descriptions for chapter headers. It’s honestly one of the most beautiful tomes I’ve ever had the privilege of placing on my shelves.

Okay, okay, I’ll stop gushing. Horrorstor is a 2014 horror-comedy novel by pop-culture journalist and pulp-fiction enthusiast Grady Hendrix. The concept is enough to make you laugh and shiver at the same time. Basically, it boils down to this: haunted IKEA. Freaky, right?

The story is set in Orsk, a furniture superstore clearly (but not officially, not at all) based on the Swedish conglomerate. Something is up in this shop, let me tell you: broken glass, soiled couches, strange graffiti… all of it appearing overnight, with no culprit in sight.

Amy is a cynical but hardworking Orsk employee, disillusioned by what she sees as a dead-end job but eager not to get herself fired all the same. Her boss, Basil, on the other hand has definitely drunk the Orsk Kool-Aid. He hand-picks Amy, and Ruth Anne (another Orsk employee whose work ethic more closely resembles Basil’s own), to stay with him in the store overnight and see if they can catch the vandals before a big inspection by their corporate overlords.

Trinity and Matt, two other Orsk employees, had the same idea… only they didn’t bother to get it sanctioned by the higher-ups. On one of their patrols, Amy and Ruth Anne discover Trinity and Matt also searching the store, but they’re looking for ghosts. And they’ve got cameras. They think there’s a haunting at Orsk, and if they capture video proof, they reckon they’ll get their own ghost-hunting TV show.

What could go wrong?

Back to the design for just a second: as Horrorstor gets progressively eerie, so too do the product descriptions that lead each chapter. They start out as innocuous pieces of furniture – a chair, a table, whatever – and gradually become more sinister as the Orsk haunting reveals itself. I mean, isn’t that brilliant?

Anyway, Horrorstor is surprisingly scary and gruesome. You’ll never be able to shop at IKEA again without a chill running down your spine (if you ever could before, that is). Hendrix totally nails the tone, the disconcerting sense of disorientation that overtakes us whenever we cross the threshold of one of those places. The discordant orderliness, the stale air… all of it makes for the perfect backdrop of a contemporary ghost story.

It’s silly to try and give trigger warnings for a horror novel, but what I will offer is this: if you’re claustrophobic, or squeamish about rats, sadly you might want to give Horrorstor a miss.

But it’s not all schlocky spooks and jump-scares. This story has hidden depths. Horrorstor mines the mind-fuck of consumerism and late-stage capitalism to fuel your nightmares. Hendrix draws our attention to the ways in which we are manipulated in retail environments, and the sinister truth behind the “daily grind”.

I particularly liked the epilogue. Hendrix doesn’t shy away from the psychological fall-out of a significant trauma like the one Amy experiences in Horrorstor, but he also ends our heroine’s journey on a note of agency and empowerment. It manages to be both truthful and hopeful, a fitting end to a very clever story. If you want a horror read with a well-developed female protagonist – written by a man, no less! – Horrorstor is the money.

In this age of blockbuster action flicks, I’m completely baffled that Horrorstor hasn’t been made into a film as yet. It’s one of the very few movies I’d actually consider paying to see in a cinema, to get the full effect of the superstore setting. Apparently, rights have been optioned by New Republic Pictures, but no word as yet as to when it will be coming to a theater near us.

In the meantime, I immediately want to read Horrorstor again – for the story, for the satirical winks I might’ve missed the first time around, for that brilliant book design that I can’t stop banging on about. I also have an equal and competing compulsion to read everything else Hendrix has ever written. I definitely highly recommend this one, and stay tuned for my thoughts on the others.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Horrorstor:

“The scares are good, but the real horror of our millennial/Gen Z job markets in a service economy was why I kept reading. The grind of our corporate jobs paralleled the ghostly villain’s torturous motivations nicely. In short, a delightful read during these soulless times.” – Michelle
“This hits me hard in the part of my soul that retail work bruised. The opening act is quite funny, especially if you’ve worked in a hellscape like this.” – Danny
“Must have worked at Ikea.” – Kindle Customer
“I just anticipated more humorous anxiety and such, and what I received was gore and brutality and ungodly depressing ideas.” – Miri F

The Year Of Living Biblically – AJ Jacobs

July 5, 2022 / Sheree / 0 Comments

The Year Of Living Biblically (subtitle: “one man’s humble quest to follow the Bible as literally as possible”) was a particularly timely read for me, in the wake of threats to Roe v Wade making world headlines and the ousting of an evangelical Prime Minister here at home. This memoir of an “immersion journalism” experiment chronicles AJ Jacobs’s attempt to live literally by each and every rule in the Bible for one full year. If we’re going to use parts of the Bible to justify real-life laws and policies, it makes sense we should look at everything else it says, too.

Jacobs was “raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world” – basically, he wanted to see whether there was anything he was missing out on by not living by the Bible’s commandments. He jokes that this project is an “extreme religious makeover”. I’m a born-and-raised atheist myself (not even in the technically-Jewish way that Jacobs is, but the only-went-in-to-a-church-that-one-time-for-a-wedding way). So, The Year Of Living Biblically was a crash-course in the contents of the Bible for me. It turns out there’s HEAPS in there that we never hear about.

Depending on which poll you look at, somewhere between 30 and 55% of Americans say that they take the Bible literally. In reality, the vast majority of them pick and choose which bits to apply (which is why you don’t see many religious folks arrested for stoning adulterers). Jacobs vowed against this kind of “cafeteria Christianity”, and to follow every rule he could find as best he could.

Before his year of Biblical living begins, he prepares by reading the Bible cover-to-cover for the very first time. Between the testaments Old and New, he finds over seven hundred rules and guidelines that he commits to follow.

Jacobs is genuine in his approach to The Year Of Living Biblically, which I really appreciated. In the hands of a determined cynic, it would have been a very different book. He actively sets aside his cynicism in favour of curiosity and commitment to the project. He’s not here to make fun of the Bible or those who adhere to his teachings, nor does he accept everything in it blindly. He takes a rigorous approach, in frequent consultation with spiritual advisors of all kinds.

He describes his experience over the course of the whole year, not quite day-by-day but almost—a close chronological account. His beard, which he mentions frequently throughout, is “the most noticeable physical manifestation” of his transformation. It grew so big and bushy that his wife wouldn’t kiss him throughout the final two months of his project. It also led others to make assumptions about him (e.g., the nurse who assumed he was an Orthodox Jew), which was interesting in and of itself.

Now, you’re probably wondering what about the, y’know, more whacky rules. The ones that break the law, or seem downright weird in a modern context. Did Jacobs really stone adulterers? Yes (in a sense). Did he offer animal sacrifices? Yes (again, probably not exactly in the way you’d imagine, but still). Did he stop wearing clothes of mixed fibers? He hired a bloke to show him how to do it right! There’s no bait-and-switch in The Year Of Living Biblically, he does exactly what it says on the tin.

And I must say: pour some out for Julie, Jacobs’s long-suffering wife, who lived with him (and bore him two sons, twin boys, conceived by IVF) throughout his year of Biblical living. She seems to have been fairly accepting in Jacobs’s account, even when he (conveniently) couldn’t take out the rubbish on the Sabbath, though she did (understandably) take issue with the “purity” rules, that required Jacobs not touch her for at least seven days after she menstruated.

By the end of The Year Of Living Biblically, Jacobs declares himself a “reverent agnostic”. Living by the Bible’s rules for twelve months didn’t make him believe in God, but it did radically change his perspective on spirituality and broke down the stereotypes he held about those who live devout lives. (And, I must say, in sharing his experiences in this book, he’s up-ended a lot of my own assumptions and misconceptions, too.)

Jacobs referenced (quite a few times) another book he’d written about another project he’d undertaken, The Know-It-All (in which he readss an entire encyclopaedia, all 32 volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica). I’ll be keeping an eye out for it, because it sounds like it would be just as interesting as this one. The Year Of Living Biblically would be a particularly good companion read alongside Religion For Atheists, too, as they have much the same message in the end (that there is room for sacred in the secular).

My favourite Amazon reviews of The Year Of Living Biblically:

“This book is awesome. I read this book the year i was pregnant. Hands down, better than ‘what to expect when you’re expecting.’” – StarSpangledGirlWithAPlan
“I bought this book thinking it would be interesting. It was. I have to admit that the author was annoying though–or at least some of the things he did. I have to give a big thumbs up to his wife for not killing or divorcing him, because I wouldn’t have been able to deal with it!” – Salix Alba
“The whole premise was ridiculous. Paul said the biggest thing Christians had to worry about was abstaining from fornication and they didn’t have to be circumcised or follow the rituals in the O.T. and the person reading for the audio book has an annoying sounding voice” – jamie lewis

Wow, No Thank You – Samantha Irby

June 28, 2022 / Sheree / 2 Comments

As soon as I heard the title of this book – Wow, No Thank You – I knew I had to read it, whatever it was. I didn’t know anything about Samantha Irby, I’d never read her blog, but I could tell she and I would get along. That feeling was only reinforced by the dedication – “This book is dedicated to Wellbutrin” – which gave me the first of many literal lols.

So, here’s what I learned from Wow, No Thank You: Irby is 40, and not entirely comfortable with that. She describes herself as a “cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person… with neck pain and no cartilage in [her] knees… who still hides past due bills under her pillow”. If that doesn’t sound like the kind of person you immediately want to befriend, perhaps Wow, No Thank You isn’t for you.

It’s a collection of essays about… stuff. Life. Ridiculous jobs. Trying to make friends as an adult. The lost art of making a mix-tape. Living in a place where most people don’t share your politics. Getting your period and bleeding all over the sheets of your Airbnb. Trying to remember why you ever found nightclubs fun. There’s even a whole essay of “Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever…” jokes (the format might mystify you if you’re not on Twitter, but it’s hilarious).

Hung Up! is one of my particular favourites from this collection, a brilliant defence of time spent on our phones. Irby presents the remarkable thesis that our phones are better than real life, if only for the fact that you can block people who bug you.

Are You Familiar With My Work? is surely the most memorable essay in this collection, if only for the intensity of the butt-clenching second-hand embarrassment. I laughed so hard my dog refused to stay on the couch with me as I read on.

Country Crock is another essay worthy of note, for different reasons. It’s a surprisingly moving piece about being a fat, black, queer woman (married to a white woman, no less) in Trump’s rural heartland. It’s a different vibe to the other essays in Wow, No Thank You, but it seems to fit right in and demonstrates Irby has range beyond poo jokes.

It would seem that Irby’s schtick is to be confrontationally honest about the kinds of things most of us would rather die than talk about. Sure, plenty of people find her essays “gross” or “too much information”, but for those of us who find her honesty refreshing, she’s a marvel. She unearths hilarious particulars of her life and manages to make them relatable. Who among us hasn’t had a hypercritical inner monologue running as we navigate the choppy waters of making a new friend? Desperately searched for a bathroom? Procrastinated as the pile of work we Really Should Be Doing grew higher and higher?

Maybe the context of having read Irby’s earlier essay collections (Meaty and We Are Never Meeting In Real Life) or her blog might’ve made Wow, No Thank You even better, but I enjoyed it thoroughly coming in cold. It’s not going to be for everyone, but it sure is for me.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Wow, No Thank You:

“The rabbit on the cover is nice, the content not so much.” – Brittany
“my wife and I were very excited to read “Wow, No Thank You” and that is effectively our reaction to it.” – R. Foshee