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(More customer reviews)That Larry Miller is a crafty one all right. You think you're reading a book of comic essays but then it suddenly dawns on you: this is really good! Impressive! It's got my brain - and my heart - pumping. How'd he do that?
I'll tell you how. This is intelligent writing that speaks to his core. Miller is not going for the short-term cheap laugh. Well, at least most times. But in order for the humor to kick in, the message has to traverse deep through the brain and take surprising twists through the heart first. So when the laugh hits, it's a full-body slam.
One device he uses is simple: he respects you. He respects that you're a smart person, that you're educated, and that you're decent. It helps if you have a love for history and classic movies. I must admit that I don't get every reference he throws in, but let me ask you this: outside of reading Sarah Vowell, how many books are you going to read that reference the Whiskey Rebellion?
Another aspect of these essays is how, at their core, they are very sweet. Not sickening sweet, just plain ol' sweet. A kind of sweet from a different grainy era, before color was invented.
One more thing: the book is also filled with life lessons Miller has learned and one chapter in particular, about the yogurt, should be required reading for a certain resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And I don't mean the cafeteria worker.
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Like Kofi Annan, Larry Miller is one of the most irresistible comic personalities working today. Known for years as an actor, writer, comedian, and sexual pioneer, he's gained a new following as a cultural commentator and frequent guest on political shows. Now, in Spoiled Rotten America, he fixes his gaze on what's funny about our daily lives—which includes, roughly speaking, everything. From middle-aged drinking ("When you're in your twenties, you can drink all night and bungee-jump off a bridge the next day. If I drank all night, I'd want to go off that bridge without the cord") to the excesses of our eating habits ("This is why the world hates us: the size of the portions we order. Thank God they've never shown us eating on Al Jazeera—that would be the end of it"), Miller finds the silver lining of absurdity within every black cloud.
Ultimately, though, Spoiled Rotten America is more than just the average yukfest. It's an insightful, and surprisingly heartfelt, plea for us to notice what's best and worst about ourselves. "The American pendulum only swings to extremes," he writes. "The news is on all day, but we know less and less; there's music in every mall, but we don't hear it; everyone has a phone but nothing to say. The chubbiest of us have the strictest diets, because we can't learn to modulate and moderate. It's all or nothing. One bite of a cookie, and suddenly you're on a plane to Vegas with a hooker. To the Cranky Nitpickers of America—a club I'd join in a second if I weren't already its president—it's long been understood that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket.
"What better time for a collection of seventeen comic essays?"
What better time indeed.
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