The most depressing part of almost any bookstore tends to be the
humor section. Because publishers produce new books so slowly, humor
sections are packed with titles by people
who were funny for a fleeting moment a year or two ago. It’s only
gotten worse since internet humor, that fickle mistress, started to
make its presence known. A perfect case in point is Stuff White
People Like, a book version of a blog that wandered into mammoth
internet fame over the last few months. SWPL was rushed
through the publication process—it even looks rough and
cheap, like an uncorrected galley. In six months, people will be
embarrassed to have it on their bookshelves, and in two years,
SWPL will no doubt adorn 50-cent racks in used bookstores
across the country. It’s the literary equivalent of drunkenly shouting
“Yeah, baby! Yeah!” in an Austin Powers voice.
Based on anecdotal bookseller’s evidence, it seems that the majority
of humor books are sold as gifts. Another big share of the market goes
to teenagers, who simply don’t have the experience and wisdom to
understand that those FoxTrot and Garfield collections aren’t going to age well. SWPL will no doubt climb
the best-seller lists for a few months, but how does a book manage to
go from tremendously popular to garbage in a year and a half?
SWPL, as well as a recently produced book based on a creepy,
self-explanatory blog called Hot Chicks with Douchebags, face
similar problems as commodities in that they’re both available, for
free, on the internet. But even without that stumbling block, these
cheap humor books have been falling flat for decades now. What’s the
reason for their intrinsic uselessness? It’s perhaps corny to point
out, but the real appeal of a timeless funny book—as opposed to
your standard humor book—is that a good funny book is written
well. Writers like David Sedaris, Sloane Crosley, and the writing staff
at the Onion produce books that can sometimes be funnier on
rereading.
Nobody equates the film fansite Ain’t It Cool News with good
writing. AICN founder Harry Knowles famously wrote about why he sat all
the way through the recent Mike Myers bomb The Love Guru:
“People had to survive the Holocaust to hold those responsible,
responsible. This film isn’t as bad as the Holocaust. Nothing could
be.” So it was with a great deal of surprise that I absolutely loved
reading Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven
Seagal, by frequent AICN contributor and uninamed local author
Vern.
I’ve never seen a Steven Seagal movie (his grunting machismo is
about as appealing to me as watching a dog lick at an infected sore),
but the sheer relentlessness of this book is fascinating. Vern watches
every single Seagal movie in order—he even reviews Seagal’s two
records, his energy drink (Steven Seagal’s Lightning Bolt Energy Drink,
both Cherry Charge and Asian Experience flavors), and a 2006 musical
performance of Seagal’s band, Thunderbox, at Seattle’s Tractor
Tavern—and after each review, he straight-facedly lists the
number of fights in bars, how much broken glass is featured in the
film, improvised weapons, and expressions of how badass other
characters declare Seagal to be. (Someone in On Deadly Ground actually says, “Delve down into the deepest bowels of your soul. Try to
imagine the ultimate fucking nightmare. And that won’t come close to
this son of a bitch when he gets pissed.”)
Vern greatly admires Seagal, but he is supremely aware of the
drawbacks of his canon. He quotes some brilliantly foul lines (some
secret-agent code from Mercenary for Justice: “Tiger, this is
Mouse. What’s happening at the beehive?”), and he openly mocks the
trashy idiocy of Seagal’s later direct-to-video offerings. From his
review of Attack Force:
“It’s not uncommon for a movie to show an establishing shot of the
Eiffel Tower and still feel that it’s necessary to put a title on the
screen to tell you that this is Paris. That’s dumb, but I’m used to
that. Attack Force takes it to the next level, using a title
that says “FRANCE, EUROPE.” So this is a movie that not only assumes we
can’t recognize the Eiffel Tower, it assumes we don’t know what
continent France is in.”
There were many points in reading Seagalogy where I was
suddenly laughing out loud, which is more than I could say for the
smirky-at-best experience of reading SWPL and
Douchebags. Part of the humor comes from the fact that Vern
relentlessly pushes through the horror of these movies to try to find
the real Steven Seagal, buried under all the cheese and bad dialogue.
To reference another internet joke that has long since gone flat, Vern
might begin the book in an ironic Chuck Norris Fact–style
context, but as he moves through the Seagal oeuvre, he falls into a
weird sort of man-love with his subject. It’s a real narrative journey,
it’s informative, and it’s written in a clear voice with a consistent,
tongue-in-cheek tone. This is a book that I want to hold onto forever;
it makes me laugh, but it also has more value than dozens of other
slapped-together humor books churned out by publishers desperate to
acquire some tiny, melting slice of cultural currency.