Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Me of Little Faith/Lewis Black/240 pp.

Lewis Black is one of my favorite stand-up comedians. His commentary on everything from politics to religion to our fascination with pseudo-celebrities always makes me laugh out loud, so I thought I would really enjoy this book. I was expecting a well-reasoned, but humorous, book-length essay on what is wrong with (organized) religion today, and how we could go about fixing it; what I got, instead, was a series of short, chapter-length rants about the usual topics associated with religion: televangelists, Mormons, growing up Jewish, child-molesting priests, etc. This is Black's version of the same ground that's been covered by any stand-up comedian that's written a book - Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser, probably Tim Allen too (although I've not forced myself to read any of his books yet). Don't get me wrong, there's some funny stuff in here, but it just doesn't compare to his stand-up routine. Worst part of the book? Tacked on, at the end, there's the script of a play about religion that Black and Mark Linn-Baker did during the 1980s. According to Black, it didn't run for very long; after reading the script, I'm not terribly surprised.

Cool list of Lewis Black quotes
list of youtube.com videos featuring Lewis Black. Much funnier than reading him, imho.

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