The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals by McSweeney's Publishing

The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals Reviews

• 
  Melki

  This is a real mixed-bag of politically incorrect yuk-yuks . . . some twos, some threes, and happily, a few fives, so I'll stick with a middling C+ rating. And, there are indeed some musicals, though unless Lin-Manuel Miranda gets a hold of them, they're probably not going to be winning any Tony Awards.
  
  The highlights, according to moi anyway, include:
  
  This Debate for Emperor of the Upsilon Sigma Star System:
  
  GOPOX: How can Demoq claim any authority on this subject when he owns an opulent twenty-two-moon planet and spent four hundred zazoos on a cranial epidermis replacement?
  
  DEMOQ: Yet you're allowed to dodge the starfleet draft and vote for the Iota-12 War? You're nothing but a chicken-clone-hawk-clone!
  
  Hmm . . . even though I'm uncertain as to the value of a zazoo, this all sounds vaguely familiar. And has there ever been a truer line spoken than this one from Occupy Main Street! - This country was founded on the proposition that all landowning white men with wigs are created equal.?
  
  And how about these Word Problems for Future Hedge-Fund Managers?
  
  Your middle-class parents have a combined household income of $115,000. You receive an allowance of $20 per week. If you save all you allowance for two years, how much debt will you have to finance to hostilely take over your family?
  
  If an American hedge fund manager makes $900 million and is taxed at a rate of 15 percent, how many American factory workers making $32,000 and being taxed at a rate of 25 percent does that make a sucker of? (Show your work.)
  
  And finally, there's the bit where the Munchkins plan to build a giant Yellow Brick Wall to keep those nasty Americans from crossing the border and murdering native Ozians.
  
  Remember - only 42 days til it's all over it all begins again for the 2020 election.
  
  
• 
  Stephany

  Some of these pieces were a lot funnier than others, but there are a lot of different humor styles in this book too. Some may find the book to be more riotous than others.
  
  My personal favorite was early in the book and it was, "From the Diary of John Adams" by Peter Krinke. I was rolling! There were some others that made me laugh out loud too. In particular, those were "Thirty and Pregnant," "Abstinence-Only Driver's Ed," "I Probably Shouldn't Have Opted for the Cheapest HMO," "Pickman's Chicken Farm is Now Cruelty-Free," and "The Next Wave: Candidate Product Placement."
  
  This was a good lazy Sunday read.
• 
  Mike

  IN WHICH A TITLE OF A REVIEW OF A MCSWEENEY'S BOOK IS GIVEN FOR THE MERE EASE OF AN OBVIOUS AND UNINSPIRED JOKE AT NO ONE'S EXPENSE, SPECIFICALLY.
  
  by Mike Yarsky
  
  
  I'm pretty sure it's impossible to create an intentionally funny book that is intentionally funny from beginning to end. Even Woody Allen's finest have a dud or two sprinkled in. It's part of the territory, and especially when it is a collection...well, a sampling of comedic taste isn't going to please one reader the whole way through. I also recommend the reader - for this exact reason - not read this book the whole way through. It's impossible to please everyone at the same time, and it's more impossible to be funny. So let's not go cuckoo on the Hatorade yet, k?
  
  I will now break some stray observations down into a list, which also seems fitting:
  
  (1) There is one author whose work is responsible for a disproportionate amount of material in this book, and outside of two semi-funny pie charts...well, I can't say, because he is an editor at The New Yorker and we all have to be careful. There are at least twenty or so "Excerpts from Someone! The Musical!" segments, and they are all horrid and unpleasant. This book suffers from not simply being "The McSweeney's Book of Politics."
  
  (2) Much like The Onion, often the title of the piece paints the whole picture, and it's more or less redundant to read the piece. A lot of the time, the piece does not heighten the conceit so much as walk the reader through that conceit, which gets a little boring. Here's a title: "The 700 Club Does The Weather." You and I both know exactly what's going to happen there, and the primary incentive is to see if it builds, leaps, or goes new directions from that basic idea. Some times, to my great delight, it does. But that's because most of the time, it doesn't.
  
  (3) Reading this made me realize that there are little memes that are great commonalities among smart people that are mutually agreed upon to broadcast some very specific form of knowledge. Yet the knowledge - though being passed off as specific - is very much shared. There are multiple satires on the universal health care system here that joke about the old notion of the "four humors." The word "plebeian" always gets used in the old foppish, condescending way. There's a lot of little pieces that like that crop up here and there through the book that make one realize how very, very collective - despite what we'd like to think - our stupid, sad little imaginations can be.
  
  Though I could bitch and moan at length about why not all of this made me laugh, some of it (despite everything) did. For the Kindle readers, search the following terms:
  
  Splost 5
  Hercules
  Seth Reiss
  Dolphin
  
  I think those pieces are worth the price of admission, and many others are fit for slight amusement. There are parts of shorter pieces that - gasp! - made me laugh out loud. But McSweeney's really is meant to be taken one day at a time. Otherwise all the familiar comedic rhythms come into place, including the whole list of three with the absurd thing at the end formula that just beckons to be changed. The Internet Tendency has accomplished finding a specific voice as channeled through multiple, multiple people: so much variety, yet so monochromatic. But it's decent enough anyhow.
• 
  Sean Carman

  The editor of this opus is a genius, and every selection is hilarious and amazing, but it's the subtle narrative thread tying the individual works together that makes this anthology so compelling. And no, I don't mean that all of the pieces are related to politics in some way, although they are. I mean the murder mystery cleverly woven into each of the selections, which unfolds with such taut suspense, and for which each entry in this anthology offers a vital clue. When the solution is discretely unveiled in the final pages -- so discretely you will miss it unless you have been reading compulsively between the lines throughout -- you'll be amazed. Think you're reading a traditional humor anthology? THINK AGAIN!
  
  I suspect this groundbreaking anthology will change humor anthologies forever. From here on out, unless audiences are given humor anthologies that double as murder mysteries, spy thrillers, or tales of intrepid adventure involving lost continents, sea monsters, and flamboyant pirates, they are going to be disappointed.
  
  Finally, Jesse Eisenberg can act AND tell funny jokes about Marxist-Socialists? Who knew?
  
  
• 
  Claire Binkley

  Some of these short stories (or whatever you call them) made me laugh really hard, some made me chuckle, and some I totally didn't understand. Such is the nature of a collection written by any selection of people and collated together. I didn't recognise any of the authors, nor did I think any of them had a distinctive style.
  
  This book was published in 2012, so it is from before the current global mess began. (I am writing from the beginning of November of 2018.)
  
  Maybe if I read closer I would have detected something clearer, but this was also my stress relief from dealing with other nasty stuff, so nevermind.
  It's just a humour book. Nothing major.
• 
  Amanda

  I’ve owned this book for a while, and now that I tried to read it, it’s too dated.
• 
  Rachel

  This was a fun read. As it was collated from the McSweeney's website, obviously some sections were funnier than others and not all of them worked. But overall I would say this is worth your time - and may make you feel better about the complete and total election overload happening right now.
• 
  Heather

  The forward may very well be the funniest part. I only read the first third of the book because I had to take it back to the library, but to be honest after the first 30 or so pages it was boring. Amusing maybe, but trying too hard and it definitely showed.
• 
  Wendy

  So far so funny - i.e. Donald Rumsfeld memoir Chapter Title or German Heavy Metal Song? - no clue.
  
• 
  Jen

  It's worth going through an election just to get some great stuff like this.
• 
  Violetta

  meh. not so funny. it all reads better online, in small doses.
• 
  Alexa

  Didn't finish it. Didn't love it. Parts were funny, but turns out I'd rather see a political musical than read a political not-quite-musical.
• 
  John Lamb

  Amusing.