Books: The Walking Man by Wright Forbucks

"The Walking Man is a unique book which deserves to be discovered by a much bigger audience."

The Walking Man by Wright Forbucks

The Walking Man tells the story of Francis 'Buddy' Morris, a selfish yet strangely likeable character who suffers from Myasthenia Gravis, an autoimmune disease which causes paralysis after muscle use, and right from the start it quickly becomes clear that this is a book which isn't afraid to pull any punches.  Likewise, author Wright Forbucks isn't a writer who will sugar coat his stories.

I was hooked right from the very start, and a combination of the unique story and the memorable characters meant that within a few chapters I was thoroughly engrossed.  It's the type of book where you say to yourself, 'I'll just read one more chapter,' and then two hours later you realise that 'one more chapter' has quickly become an extended reading session.

If you were a cynical person then you might possibly argue that certain elements of the plot are unrealistic, but as Wright Forbucks himself points out, the truth is often stranger than fiction.  Real life can also be incredibly unrealistic sometimes, and despite the non-conventional nature of the plot, the blurb describes The Walking Man as 'loosely based on a true story'.

Movie: Clear History

A treat for fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Clear History starring Larry David

Any Larry David fans who haven't yet seen Clear History will be pleased to know that it follows the tried and tested format followed by Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the result is a brilliantly funny movie.  Although not a carbon copy, Larry's character Nathan/Rolly still has some similarities with the Larry David character from Curb, most notably that they both seem cursed with the same bad luck.

Another similarity is that Clear History was also produced in an improvisational style, rather than by following a script.  According to Larry David, in some cases this helped create extra unintended laughs, as for example the character of Frank (Nathan's friend and co-conspirator in his quest for revenge, played by Danny McBride) was originally meant to be more of a straight role, but because of Danny McBride's improvisational skills he ended up with more jokes in the finished version than intended.

One thing which is different though, is that Nathan has a sinister side to his character and this provides a key element of the plot.  The story sees Nathan Flomm fall out with his friend and business partner just before the launch of a new electronic car (known as the 'Howard') which goes on to be the success story of the decade.  As a result Nathan loses out on what would have potentially made him a billion dollars, and becomes a figure of media ridicule.

TV: Impractical Jokers

"Warning: The following program contains scenes of graphic stupidity among four lifelong friends who compete to embarrass each other."

Whichever Joker gets the most fails is that week's loser
and has to suffer the end of show punishment.

That's the cautionary note that precedes every episode of Impractical Jokers and at its most basic level that's what the show is all about; four friends trying to embarrass each other.  What the warning doesn't mention though, is just how funny Impractical Jokers is.

I got into Impractical Jokers more and more as the first season progressed and I think it definitely helps the humour once you get to know the personalities of the four jokers.  Once I was hooked, some of the episodes had me absolutely crying my eyes out with laughter and in fact on one occasion I was literally laughing so much that I had a sore throat.

TV: Celebrity Bedlam

Celebrity Bedlam: It's got celebrities in it and it's bedlam.

Lee Kern, the presenter and creator of Celebrity Bedlam.

In the words of Lee Kern, "Celebrity Bedlam is the show where we explore the hot topics of the day by playing pranks on fame-hungry celebs and getting them to take part in fake TV shows."  In reality there’s very little exploration of hot topics going on and the focus of the show is pretty much entirely based around ridiculing celebrities through crazy and sometimes bizarre jokes and tricks.

Each episode of Celebrity Bedlam features sketches and pranks of a similar general theme, such as the environment, travel and adventure, or health and lifestyle, but in truth it’s all just a big excuse to have a laugh at celebrities’ expense.

Books: How To Save The World: An Alien Comedy by Charles Fudgemuffin

"...an entertaining humorous read."

How To Save The World: An Alien Comedy
by Charles Fudgemuffin.

On Worthy Of A Bigger Audience I usually feature music, movies, TV shows, books, etc which in my opinion more people need to know about.  However, I'm not really qualified to make an unbiased decision as to whether the book featured this week is worthy of a bigger audience, because I wrote it.

The book in question is How To Save The World: An Alien Comedy which is the first book in the 'How To Save The World' saga.  You can sample the first three chapters for free on amazon's website, so any Kindle owners (or Kindle app users) who enjoy sci-fi comedy have nothing to lose by downloading the first three chapters for free and giving it a read:
US: How To Save The World: An Alien Comedy
UK: How To Save The World: An Alien Comedy

Here's a quote from a review of the book on amazon.com from Todd A. Fonseca (member of Amazon Vine™ Voice):

"How to Save The World by Charles Fudgemuffin, is funny.  Think Monty Python meets Saturday Night Live funny...  ...this is an entertaining humorous read.  The style of humor is likely one that will not resonate with everyone, so grab a sample from Amazon or Charles' website and find out.  If you like the sample, you'll enjoy the rest."

TV: Red Dwarf X

Red Dwarf X: Recaptures the sci-fi comedy vibe of earlier series.

Red Dwarf X ... it feels like it's never been away.

Red Dwarf has returned and it feels like it’s never been away, as very little has changed.  Rimmer is still sitting, and failing, his astronavigation exams, Lister is just as slobby as he ever was, Cat is just as vain and image-obsessed, and Kryten’s mannerisms are all still  firmly intact.  And of course, most importantly the jokes are just as funny and as silly as ever.

In fact right from the opening few notes of the theme tune to the first episode, I immediately started to feel a sense of nostalgia as memories of watching the early Red Dwarf shows as a child started to return.  The whole show has a reassuring air of familiarity to it, with the sense of humour pretty much identical to those early days.  The same sense of manic daftness to things is in attendance, while at the same time as you’d expect Red Dwarf X also features some creatively clever ideas.

TV: Fool Britannia

More hilarious pranks and comic creations from Dom Joly.

Fool Britannia featuring Dom Joly as the asbo vicar
and many other great new characters.

I have to admit that although I enjoyed the first episode of Fool Britannia, overall I was still left feeling ever so slightly disappointed.  The trouble was that I had been expecting an exact replica of Dom Joly’s first hidden camera prank show, Trigger Happy, and although there are a lot of obvious similarities between the two shows, Fool Britannia is nevertheless its own show.

It would be fair to say that Fool Britannia is kind of an ITV-ified version of Trigger Happy.  It takes the same general formula and then tinkers with it slightly to produce a more mainstream friendly show.  For example, whereas Trigger Happy would link sketches together with cool indie tunes, Fool Britannia instead features voice-overs to introduce some of the sketches.

Books: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

If you’re a fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy then it’s a safe bet that you will also love this book.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency has that unmistakably
unique Douglas Adams sense of brilliant weirdness about it.

Usually when reviewing a book it’s normally quite a simple task to provide a brief one chapter summary at the start of the review to summarise the basic plot of the story, but with Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency the brilliantly unique quirkiness of the story make it a somewhat more difficult task to sum it all up in one paragraph.

So instead I’ll quote from Douglas Adams himself when he describes it as, “A thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic.”  There are so many elements to this book that it’s extremely hard to categorise, but that comment from Douglas Adams sums it up as accurately as it’s possible to do in one sentence.

And although the title might suggest that Dirk Gently is the one man star of the show, in actual fact there are several interesting characters in this book with Dirk himself not actually making a first appearance until a few chapters into the story.  In actual fact Richard MacDuff, a computer programmer who’s creations include software to convert company accounts into music and a 3D computer model to attempt to work out how to remove the sofa stuck halfway up his stairs, is perhaps closer to what you would usually describe as the main character than Dirk.

TV: Alan Partridge, Welcome To The Places Of My Life

One Of The Funniest Characters On TV...

Alan Partridge, as hilarious as ever.

He’s back, and once again he’s at his brilliant best.  In Welcome To The Places Of My Life, Alan Partridge is as unintentionally hilarious as ever.

 

In the show Alan introduces us to some of the key places in Norfolk and if like me your immediate thought was ‘surely Norfolk doesn’t have enough places of significance to fill an extended special,’ then you’d be right.  Even before the halfway point Alan is introducing us to his local newsagent, but the great thing about Alan is that he can make even the most mundane location or event sound incredibly dramatic.  For example at one point in the show he guides us around Norwich City Hall and reveals with the unmistakably over-the-top sense of drama that is his trademark, “It’s incredible to think so few people know how close this city came to a blanket imposition of night-time parking fees.”

Graphic Novel: Groo And Rufferto

Another amusingly daft tale from Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier.

Groo And Rufferto, originally published as a
four issue mini series, then later reprinted
as a graphic novel.

In Groo And Rufferto, Groo (an extremely dumb but highly skilled warrior from times gone by) and his faithful canine companion wander into the land of King Ravenus, a gold-worshipping ruler who loves wealth so much that he spends all his time either gazing upon his hoards of treasure or dreaming up new taxes to impose on his people.  So paranoid is he that he will one day encounter someone who wants to steal his gold, that King Ravenus sets his wizard, Anakrony, the task of discovering the means to transport him to a safe and faraway land.

Anakrony decides that the safest place would be to disappear somewhere where his enemies can’t follow him … the future.  More specifically the present day.  Unfortunately for Groo and Rufferto, it is Rufferto that Anakrony uses to test his time travel formula and that sets up the story-line as Groo then refuses to let anyone cross the bridge into King Ravenus’ land until he gets his dog back.

TV: Parks And Recreation

Parks And Recreation: Criminally overlooked in the UK

Lesley Knope flanked by Tom and Ann.

For those who have never heard of Parks And Recreation (which in the UK might be quite a few), this is how the programme was first described to me:

"It's like The American Office but better."

To be fair to The Office, the mate who recommended it to me isn't a massive Office fan like myself, but I would still put Parks And Rec on a par with it.  That only makes it all the more a shame that a show as good as this remains largely undiscovered to a UK audience who would no doubt love it if they only knew about it.

To put the figures into perspective, at the time of writing the Season One DVD currently has 2,502 likes on amazon.com versus only 25 likes on amazon.co.uk.  The English sense of humour surely isn't that much different from the American sense of humour, so the difference can only be explained by the fact that virtually no-one in the UK has heard of Parks And Rec.

Movie: Super

Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page as
The Crimson Bolt and Boltie.

"Shut Up, Crime!"

Super tells the story of Frank Darbo who on discovering his wife has left him for a local drug baron, decides to put on his hero costume and adopt the persona of The Crimson Bolt as he takes to the streets to fight crime, at times in an extremely violent manner.

I suspect the extremeness of the violence is probably meant to be a parody of comic book violence but whatever the motivation behind it, it’s still approaching gruesome at times and therefore the humour is for the most part quite dark.  It would be fair to say that Frank’s methods of dealing with crime are closer to those of The Punisher rather than the likes of Spiderman or a similarly more family friendly super hero.

I’m a massive fan of The Office and so it was Rainn Wilson’s presence that first brought Super to my attention.  However, in some ways the character of Frank Darbo is the very opposite of Dwight Schrute, although there are some similarities.  For example Frank is a similarly dorky character, but unlike Dwight he is well aware of this fact and suffers from major self-confidence issues.  Frank’s behaviour is extremely unhinged at times, and some of his more severe actions even make Dwight look the model of sensibility and normality.

Books: A Bus Could Run You Over by Colin Butts

Or In My Case ‘A Coconut Could Land On Your Head’

A Bus Could Run You Over by Colin Butts

I was actually relaxing on the beach reading this book when a coconut came crashing down from the tree above me and smacked into the sand, landing close to my head.  The near miss from the coconut really underlined the message of the story and there was one paragraph in particular which left a strong impression on me to make the most of life.

It was a message I listened to, as for the last eight years since that fateful near miss with the coconut, I've lived by that philosophy and gone backpacking for five or six months every winter to see more of the the world.  Life's too short to waste time doing things you don't want to do, and although perhaps reading  'A Bus Could Run You Over' wasn't the only factor which helped me arrive at that realisation, it nevertheless played its part in nudging me in that direction.

Anyway, aside from leaving a positive impression on me this is a book which I would definitely highly recommend.  Most people will probably be more familiar with Colin Butts' first two books ‘Is Harry On The Boat?’ and ‘Is Harry Still On The Boat?’ (on account of the TV series shown on Sky) and while they were also funny books, this is my clear favourite.  It feels as if by this stage Colin has expanded on his ability to write very funny stories and added the ability to also create writing which can be very memorable and powerful.