Megan Amram is a writer for Parks and Recreation. More importantly, she's the author of one of my all-time favorite tweets:


So we know that Amram can write a tweet. And we know she can write a funny 21-minute situation comedy. (Fun fact: She got her job at Parks and Recreation because she was so funny on Twitter. This is an amazing story that will never, ever happen to you.) But can she write a book?

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I'll spare you the suspense. Yes. Yes, she can write a book. My proof? She has written a book. That book is titled Science...for Her!, and it's a profusely illustrated cross between a science textbook and an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. But you failed to ask the right question at the end of the last paragraph. You should have asked, can she write a good book? Okay, I'll spare you the suspense again. Yes. Science...for Her! is a good, funny book. And unlike most of the hundreds of "humor" books that level forests every year to take up bookshelf space in terrible mall paper stores, it's actually a well-written book, with a beginning, middle and end.

Amram plays a character in Science...for Her!, an airhead who's supposed to be writing a basic guide to science but who can't stop thinking about her ex-boyfriend Xander. ("One of his eyes is a little wonky, but whatevs, his dick is basically the size and girth of an ocean buoy.") It's not just a bunch of sarcastic "women are too dumb for science" jokes, although some of the obvious jokes happen because they have to; in the biology chapter that opens the book, the "Genes" page features photographs of jeans because "it's distracting to bring up a homophone of one of women's favorite things without showing them." At the bottom of the page, Amram admits that she's "covered in the sour nectar of the sweats that I get when I look at great jeans. I smell like a 7-Eleven meatball sub filled with rotten Starburst." This is immediately followed by an informational box on the next page titled "How to Quickly Clean Up After the Jean Sweats."

A book full of the comedy you'd expect is by definition not funny, so Amram instead drops the reader into a whirlwind of weird jokes. There's a taxonomy of pubic hair, Paula Deen's fruit salad recipe (ingredients, in their entirety: "1 1-lb bag Skittles, 3 cups ranch dressing"), Sylvia Plath references, a Kickstarter campaign to pay off the national debt, photographs of "Famous Women Scientists..WITHOUT MAKEUP!," and an entire chapter devoted to kale.

We get a lot of humor books for review at The Stranger, and most of them suck, in part just because they're a bunch of funny lines slapped between a couple covers. When you think about your favorite standup act, that's not what good comedy is. Good comedy involves a character, even if it's just a hyper-stylized version of the comedian, and a narrative journey. It's storytelling. Amram understands that, and the framework she provides for Science...for Her! makes it an exceptional, and exceptionally funny, comedy book. Buy it for someone you love for Christmas, but make sure you read it before you give it away. (Trust me—unless you spill peanut butter on the pages, they'll never be able to tell.)