The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: My Darkest Prayer by S. A. Cosby

Book #74 of 2023:

My Darkest Prayer by S. A. Cosby

I went back to read this 2019 debut novel on the strength of author S. A. Cosby’s later works Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears, and I can confirm that his talent for immersive storytelling is already apparent here. It’s another crime thriller / southern noir, in which an unconventional investigator digs into a local mystery, gets impressively bloodied by the various factions he riles up, and deals back his own damage twice as hard. I once saw someone refer to Cosby as the Black Elmore Leonard, and that’s honestly not too far off the mark!

On the other hand, there are some definite weaknesses in this earlier text, like a reliance on character archetypes he’d subsequently learn to either skew or avoid altogether. The romantic interest feels particularly egregious in this regard, as a literal porn star who falls for the protagonist immediately and assures him that he’s better in bed than anyone she’s ever been with before. (Sex workers of course deserve love stories just like everyone else, but this femme fatale seems less like an attempt at representation and more like a juvenile bit of wish fulfillment for the writer’s stand-in.) The plot is also fairly straightforward, again using familiar pieces very well but never quite elevating them into something distinctive. Still, it’s a first book with a lot of promise, and I’m delighted the author has now fully grown into that.

[Content warning for racism including slurs, gun violence, torture, child rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: It’s OK to Be Angry about Capitalism by Bernie Sanders

Book #73 of 2023:

It’s OK to Be Angry about Capitalism by Bernie Sanders

This new release is the third book I’ve read from Senator Bernie Sanders, following 2016’s Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In and 2018’s Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance. If that first title laid out the author’s political philosophy of modern democratic socialism in the wake of his surprisingly strong but ultimately unsuccessful presidential primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, and the second one made the case for his renewed 2020 run, it’s not immediately clear what the point of this next volume is. (It’s possible Sanders will throw his hat into the ring for president again, in which case a political book would be a standard early move, but the text itself gives no indication of that. His Senate seat is up for re-election in 2024, so perhaps he’s just laying the groundwork for that statewide race.)

From the name of it, I would have expected this publication to be more of a narrow diatribe against the victimization and inequality allowed to fester under an unchecked capitalistic society, but as before, it’s more of a split between the latest iteration of the politician’s overall stump speech calling for various progressive reforms — which admittedly encompasses those themes — and a touting of his own record in advancing that agenda, in this case with a focus on the 2020 primary season, his efforts to both support Joe Biden and push him leftward after losing out on the Democratic Party nomination to that more moderate rival, and the Biden presidency to date. There are no big revelations here for anyone who followed the news over that span — again raising the question of this book’s intended audience — but I suppose it’s an interesting play-by-play recap if you didn’t know / forgot Bernie’s role in all that.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Seinfeld, season 1

TV #28 of 2023:

Seinfeld, season 1

This classic 90s sitcom gets off to a bit of a rough start — the first season is made up of only five episodes, the pilot of which feels particularly unfinished, with no Elaine, a misnamed Kramer, and a somewhat backwards George-and-Jerry dynamic. Even after that, these early installments are both using too much of the star’s standup material and struggling to incorporate its topics into the primary plot of the day.

The show has also become a strange time capsule, in ways both good and bad. On the downside: lots of hackneyed jokes about the stereotypical supposed differences between men and women, and a rather white cast for a series set in NYC (although I suppose the implicit Jewishness of the main characters and the overall tone of the writing is a nice piece of representation, especially for the era). On the upside, it’s a fascinating viewpoint into a now-bygone world without social media or cell phones, which has a direct impact on how events in any given episode play out differently than they would today. Because this is a program so obsessed with minutiae and rambling conversations that wind up fussing over such mundane details, we get a lot of that sort of slice-of-life focus that isn’t always as present in other series from the same period.

The pieces are generally here for the powerhouse comedy that the title would become, but the storytelling isn’t quite clicking into gear yet, particularly when it comes to incorporating Kramer into everything else. We also haven’t seen any recurring guest stars or other signs of serialization / worldbuilding at this stage — and yes, I know that co-creator Larry David famously mandated that there would be no learning or growing for Jerry and his friends. But he also called this a show about nothing, and it’s already clear that that’s not entirely accurate either. So I am expecting some minor continuity to help strengthen the affair at some point, in addition to a tighter plot engine and more memorable quotes all-around.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Swamp Story by Dave Barry

Book #72 of 2023:

Swamp Story by Dave Barry

This comic novel fits squarely in the ‘zany Florida’ genre popularized by writers like Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey, or indeed, author Dave Barry himself. If you like such stories of madcap plots colliding against a backdrop of alligators, rednecks, treasure hunters, corrupt politicians, and other Sunshine State institutions, you’ll probably find this one satisfying as well, although I can’t say that it does much to stand out from that existing literary tradition. I also think a few of Barry’s weaknesses are unfortunately on display here, from fatphobic physical descriptions to the use / threat of sexual assault to increase the stakes, not to mention his rather repetitive and pedestrian sentence construction. It’s still a funny piece, but the character voices all sound pretty much alike, which makes it hard to keep track of everyone in the large ensemble cast (especially but not only due to the author’s performance as his own audiobook narrator).

Some of the intersecting threads here include: gold bars from the Civil War era discovered in the Everglades, an effort to fake footage of a new cryptid to rival Florida’s infamous skunk ape (don’t ask), a variety of bumbling crooks and mobsters, a would-be reality TV star, an emotional-support boar, viral TikTok memes, a python hunt, and all manner of absurdly inane conversations. These elements come crashing together more or less as expected, and it all basically works for the overall narrative. But it feels like the kind of thing Dave Barry could crank out in his sleep these days, and I’m not entirely convinced that he hasn’t.

Two-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for drug and alcohol abuse, gun violence, gore, and infant endangerment.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, season 5

TV #27 of 2023:

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, season 5

I’m not a big fan of the decision to pepper this final season with flash-forward scenes to decades in the future, where we learn that the titular comedienne — and her manager! — will eventually achieve their dream of striking it big in showbusiness. For me at least, the knowledge of that forthcoming fame rather punctures the tension back in the moment, fun as it is to see glimpses of the kids’ adult lives and the main actors in old-age makeup. It reframes the story to be one of Midge definitively on the cusp of stardom, which flattens the usual issue of her self-sabotaging pride and proves somewhat tedious to watch play out in slow motion.

With that being said, the episode with the Friars Club roast is truly well done, and the series finale does a good job of making the heroine’s breakthrough feel earned by her specific choices, not to mention paralleling and commenting on certain events from way back in the pilot. I’m still not convinced that her material or her delivery has actually improved between then and now, but we’ve seen her grinding away at it for so long that it’s easy to root for and celebrate the win.

Giving the protagonist a position as a late-night screenwriter seems largely an excuse for the production team to recreate yet another fixture of mid-century Americana, but I’m okay with it, since those lush visuals are one of the elements I’ll miss most about the show, along with its thorough Jewishness and extended cast of characters who are all just as funny as the stand-up comic lead (but I repeat myself). Anyway, it’s an improvement over the last couple of seasons and ultimately a decent farewell act, so I’ll go with a rating of three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Season rated: 1 > 2 > 5 > 3 > 4

TV Review: The Shield, season 6

TV #26 of 2023:

The Shield, season 6

This season of The Shield is a bit scattered compared to the ones before it. It’s initially exciting to see that Forest Whitaker is sticking around past his initial one-year-arc, given how thrilling the Kavanaugh investigation of Mackey has been, but then after a couple episodes, he’s abruptly out of the picture. Instead it seems like most of this run will be about the tightening noose of Vic getting closer to finding out what really happened to his friend in the previous finale — but then he learns that information halfway through and the story again has to reorient. These shifts keep the audience on our toes, and they wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if they were in service to some greater narrative purpose taking shape in their wake. But here, too much of it just feels like random noise.

It doesn’t help that a few of the characters are making choices that don’t register as particularly well-motivated, from Shane’s sudden partnership with the Armenians to Dutch’s weird escalating feud with Billings. Strike team newcomer Kevin Hiatt is especially egregious in this regard, his characterization seemingly mutating by the week to serve the writers’ current needs. And the background politics are murkier than usual too, with a lot of exposition about a nebulous Mexican / Salvadoran cartel war that seldom hits home for the cast in any meaningful ways. In prior dealings with the various gangland factions, we’ve gotten more specific personalities for antagonists, but now that element largely reads as an afterthought of context for Vic and Shane’s extralegal maneuvering.

With that being said, this series is generally competent enough that an off-year is still fun to watch. It’s great to finally get to see the new captain’s style of leadership, and plenty of scenes have that signature twisted Shield humor to them, along with the ever-present critiques both implicit and explicit that policing is an inherently flawed arrangement that breeds corruption and rarely serves the community’s true interests in the long run. The ticking-clock of Mackey’s impending forced retirement adds some good tension and desperate scrabbling, which is the mode his antihero protagonist tends to work best in. But overall I would call this outing a weaker effort.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, sexual assault, racism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Marley by Jon Clinch

Book #71 of 2023:

Marley by Jon Clinch

Jacob Marley is a bit of a blank slate in the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol — which is not a fault; he serves his purpose in the narrative there most admirably — and so he represents a logical candidate for this sort of treatment by a later writer, expanding scant kernels of characterization into a full-fledged backstory. Unfortunately, however, the resulting text here bears so little resemblance to the original that I can scarcely understand why author Jon Clinch has bothered positioning it as a related story at all.

What are we told by Dickens about Marley, the former business partner of Ebenezer Scrooge who has been dead for seven years when that famous tale opens? Simply that he was a miser in life, every bit the equal of the still-living associate whom his ghost now returns to warn. That shade appears bound in chains reflecting his mortal focus on profits to the exclusion of all else, and he calls it the mirror of one awaiting Scrooge, who’s so similar he has kept the firm called Scrooge and Marley and answers readily to either name in his dealings. In short: the piece is a morality play on unchecked capitalism, and Marley is the cautionary example whose path Scrooge must steer away from, once his eyes are opened by the three spirits which follow.

Not so in Clinch’s version. Here, Marley is a moral reprobate and a conniver of the highest order. He gleefully participates in the African slave trade, and sets up elaborate false identities and record books to hide the practice from Scrooge when Ebenezer’s fiancee objects. He impersonates police officers to shake down local brothels for protection money and a free sampling of their wares. He spins an extravagant web of lies to woo Scrooge’s sister, after hiring a man to kill her husband. In short, his sins are far greater than pure greed, and while his machinations known and unknown take their toll on Ebenezer, winnowing him over time from a well-meaning naif to the familiar coldhearted figure, the two men are in no way responsible for equivalent crimes. It’s downright silly to imagine that this Marley would be punished in the hereafter for the trifle of his lack of charity, nor that this Scrooge would be in line for his same fate.

But even if this novella isn’t meant to be approached as a plausibly canonical prequel, it’s not terribly satisfying in and of itself. The first half in particular is very dry in its rote accounting of the antihero’s misdeeds, and while he eventually feels more like a real person making active choices to overcome fresh challenges, the lingering sense remains that of a criminal mastermind effortlessly executing a variety of schemes on his unsuspecting victims. His deathbed regrets are likewise thin and unconvincing, and perhaps worst of all, there’s just too little sign of any actual Scrooge/Marley partnership throughout. For me as a reader, the book doesn’t work as either a Christmas Carol reimagining or an independent plot on its own terms.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Saturday Night Live, season 48

TV #25 of 2023:

Saturday Night Live, season 48

I’m a little behind on this review, since I only belatedly found out that the venerable sketch-comedy series had officially canceled its remaining episodes of this production batch due to the ongoing writers’ strike, rather than postponing them indefinitely. Strictly speaking, then, this was the 16th television season that I finished watching in 2023, even though I didn’t know it at the time (and don’t feel like going back to update the numbering now).

Despite the unexpected truncation, this run acquits itself well. I always like to assess each iteration of SNL by noting what made it different, and in this case, the biggest change is that eight cast members from the year before did not return, and a ninth, Cecily Strong, popped up for only a few weeks in the middle before making her official departure as well. While their talent is missed — except for Aristotle Athari, sorry — I’d say that in their wake, the ensemble feels like a leaner and more cohesive troupe. We’ve still added four new featured players and have the Please Don’t Destroy guys knocking around for a second year with their prerecorded skits, but everyone’s getting more screen time on average than they had been for a while there.

As far as the newcomers go, Molly Kearney is a delightful self-sabotaging physical actor in the Chris Farley tradition, who also breaks ground as the program’s first nonbinary cast member — a status which allows for some unique humor without ever making them seem like a punchline themself. Fluent Spanish speaker Marcello Hernandez brings his own manic energy to the table as well, especially when paired with likewise bilingual hosts such as Pedro Pascal or Ana de Armas. Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker haven’t made as strong an impression on me, but I’d expect at least one of them to probably return next season anyway.

Overall, the sketches are solid too. Some favorites of mine from this stretch include “Wing Pit” (a clear unhinged successor to the old Taco Town bit), “COVID Commercial” (a scathing piece of social commentary on the present apathetic state of our collective pandemic response), and “A Christmas Carol” (just an absurdly over-the-top gorefest punctuated by Steve Martin and Martin Short’s impeccable comic timing). But the winner has got to be Michael B. Jordan in “Jake from State Farm,” which extends that handsome corporate spokesman to his hilariously logical extreme.

I’m sad that we aren’t getting the last few planned episodes of this run, but I of course support the strike and hope that it leads to more equitable contracts for the writers of this show and all the others. And even at a shortened length without any big sendoff, I would call season 48 a win.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 13

TV #24 of 2023:

Bob’s Burgers, season 13

As usual, this family cartoon is again riding the bubble between a three- and a four-star program for me. I’ll round up on this occasion, because even though I don’t have much new critical insight to offer, enough of these individual episodes seem to stand out as among the better of recent years. Given the agelessness of the characters over time, we may not believe Louise in “The Show (and Tell) Must Go On” when she bemoans her upcoming last presentation of that ilk, but there’s still the appearance of growth for her, as well as effective tugs on the heartstrings in installments like “The Plight Before Christmas” or “Show Mama from the Grave.” And hey, it’s nice for Bob — with some help — to finally get one over on Mr. Fischoeder in “What a (April) Fool Believes,” even if we can presumably guess that it will do little to alter their underlying dynamic.

As the first season to follow the movie, this year also features an update to the sequence of disasters in the opening credits, which goes a long way towards making the show feel fresher. It’s a jolt of added energy to start off each story, and a reminder that even this late in its run, there is still a possibility of change for the Belchers and their extended town community.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Six Feet Under, season 5

TV #23 of 2023:

Six Feet Under, season 5

This final season perpetuates a lot of my existing frustrations with Six Feet Under, and as I watched, I expected that I’d probably give it the same two-star rating that I handed the previous year. The characters are all melodramatic and self-sabotaging far more often than they’re compelling protagonists by this stage, and the show has long passed the point where it’s able to wring much pathos from the established nature of the funeral home setting or any particular client of the week. Luckily the last few episodes mark a step in the right direction, by means of a sudden personal tragedy for the family that in many ways forms a natural bookend with a parallel development back in the pilot. Here again, the survivors are forced to pull together, to confront their own mortality, and to consider the ways in which their paths going forward will be forever altered by the new absence. It’s a melancholic mood I wish the series had been able to maintain throughout.

Before then, however, we have the latest wave of Fisher / Chenowith / Diaz nonsense to sit through. Claire’s dating the walking red-flag Billy, then later drops out of art school and throws a tantrum that her trust fund won’t pay for her nebulously hedonistic lifestyle. In an out-of-nowhere twist a la Pacey in the later seasons of Dawson’s Creek, she ultimately gets a random corporate job and starts a new romance with a guy who’ll always be Danny from The Mindy Project to me. Meanwhile, Nate is feuding with his pregnant wife and falling for his ex-stepsister, which won’t even be the most incestuous thing that the writers decide to spring on us. David and Keith have the most reasonable plot of becoming new parents, while Ruth is mainly just bitter and complaining about everything these days. Rico spends most of the season trying to win back his wife’s affections, although it mostly seems like she just gets tired of fighting him. And as ever, all these folks are still regularly seeing daydream visions of various dead people who function to express their deepest fears.

It’s all fine or at least not too awful, and the ending really does help draw the story together. But I’ve never been as satisfied with this show as it patently is with itself, and I’m happy to finally put it in my rear-view.

[Content warning for gun violence, homophobia, drug abuse, and suicide.]

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 3 > 2 > 1 > 5 > 4