My father pointed me in the direction of this Alex Beam column in the Boston Globe: “Poetry month is over; time to get psyched”.
I feel a dawning sense of exhilaration when I read a writer who is so funny. A truly funny writer is a very rare thing. My friend Mitchell refers to certain comedic novelists as “sheer liquid joy”. Like when we read the book Lives of the Saints together, years ago, literally SNORTING with laughter, shaking with guffaws, reading stuff out loud to each other, tears of laughter streaming down our cheeks.
Catch-22 is like that as well. And, of course, the infamous I Was a Teenage Dwarf, by Max Shulman. I read it in high school and was asked to leave the library because I was disturbing the other patrons with my shrieks of laughter. I tried to keep it under control, but I could not. That is probably the funniest book I have ever read.
I read Alex Beam’s prose and found myself getting all excited, like: “Oh God. This man is a FUNNY.”
