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Review - Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!
Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!
By Scott Adams
Portfolio/Penguin. $24.95 USD
Scott Adams has already had a couple nonfiction bestsellers capitalizing off the success of Dilbert, but this one is a collection of his blog postings on whatever he felt like on that day. I'm not a Dilbert fan, but neither would I say I hate the strip. I'm sure I've found some of them amusing but haven't read any in years. I don't begrudge Adams his phenomenal success, but just don't find him all that talented.
Most of the book really didn't bother me. Adams is a very smart man who has some good ideas about how to improve annoying aspects of daily life or how to deal with annoying people, or at least how to complain about same in an amusing way. Adams is low on insight into the human condition, but does make the most of comic gold dust when he can't find nuggets. I didn't laugh out loud, but there was little I actively disliked. The book does start to get dragged down pretty early, however, with Adams' unwarranted pride in coining phrases, such as when he begins to use "BOCTAOE" in several essays as a running gag (But Of Course There Are Obvious Exceptions). That tedious phrase is actually a microcosm of the Adams ethos: treat every joke, phrase or comedic premise like a rented mule and ride it into the ground.
The only thing I reacted at all strongly to was what I felt was Adams' compulsion to list his successes while trying to come across as humble. His Introduction uses no less than eight examples from his life where he flouted conventional wisdom with great success--winning a newspaper contest, proving a teacher wrong, throwing some samples together and getting his comic strip going on the first try--and this, and the self-deprecating title, are intended to let the reader know that, even in the field of blogging/online punditry, he knows what he's doing. He may call himself a dumbass, but he'll also tell you he is unusually smart. Even when he recounts a serious and very unusual medical condition he develops, the way he delights in telling you how he diagnosed the problem using Google is so smug it's hard to muster a lot of sympathy, even when the condition makes it seem to others that he's intentionally using a funny voice.
To be fair, Adams' essays display a higher level of craft than the typical blog posting, though they generally result in either mild standup comedy premises or altogether too many recountings of this or that Dilbert strip that was run in an edited form and why. Those are particularly bothersome because the edited versions aren't funny but Adams is happy enough to go with the flow because he gets to run the "edgier" and somewhat funnier version on his website. I guess you have to think a monkey flying out of a lawyer's butt is funny in the first place to be interested in how you can draw this without offending newspaper syndicate people.
By Scott Adams
Portfolio/Penguin. $24.95 USD
Scott Adams has already had a couple nonfiction bestsellers capitalizing off the success of Dilbert, but this one is a collection of his blog postings on whatever he felt like on that day. I'm not a Dilbert fan, but neither would I say I hate the strip. I'm sure I've found some of them amusing but haven't read any in years. I don't begrudge Adams his phenomenal success, but just don't find him all that talented.
Most of the book really didn't bother me. Adams is a very smart man who has some good ideas about how to improve annoying aspects of daily life or how to deal with annoying people, or at least how to complain about same in an amusing way. Adams is low on insight into the human condition, but does make the most of comic gold dust when he can't find nuggets. I didn't laugh out loud, but there was little I actively disliked. The book does start to get dragged down pretty early, however, with Adams' unwarranted pride in coining phrases, such as when he begins to use "BOCTAOE" in several essays as a running gag (But Of Course There Are Obvious Exceptions). That tedious phrase is actually a microcosm of the Adams ethos: treat every joke, phrase or comedic premise like a rented mule and ride it into the ground.
The only thing I reacted at all strongly to was what I felt was Adams' compulsion to list his successes while trying to come across as humble. His Introduction uses no less than eight examples from his life where he flouted conventional wisdom with great success--winning a newspaper contest, proving a teacher wrong, throwing some samples together and getting his comic strip going on the first try--and this, and the self-deprecating title, are intended to let the reader know that, even in the field of blogging/online punditry, he knows what he's doing. He may call himself a dumbass, but he'll also tell you he is unusually smart. Even when he recounts a serious and very unusual medical condition he develops, the way he delights in telling you how he diagnosed the problem using Google is so smug it's hard to muster a lot of sympathy, even when the condition makes it seem to others that he's intentionally using a funny voice.
To be fair, Adams' essays display a higher level of craft than the typical blog posting, though they generally result in either mild standup comedy premises or altogether too many recountings of this or that Dilbert strip that was run in an edited form and why. Those are particularly bothersome because the edited versions aren't funny but Adams is happy enough to go with the flow because he gets to run the "edgier" and somewhat funnier version on his website. I guess you have to think a monkey flying out of a lawyer's butt is funny in the first place to be interested in how you can draw this without offending newspaper syndicate people.
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