My father pointed me in the direction of this Alex Beam column in the Boston Globe: “Poetry month is over; time to get psyched”. <\/p>\n
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<\/em> together, years ago, literally SNORTING with laughter, shaking with guffaws, reading stuff out loud to each other, tears of laughter streaming down our cheeks. <\/p>\n Catch-22<\/em> is like that as well. And, of course, the infamous I Was a Teenage Dwarf<\/em>, 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. <\/p>\n I read Alex Beam’s prose and found myself getting all excited, like: “Oh God. This man is a FUNNY.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. … Continue reading