Pun Salad

I've been a longtime reader of Frank J. Fleming's hilarious blog, IMAO. Recently he's moved into an actual paying gig as an op-edder for the New York Post. (Example here.) He's husband to the lovely SarahK and dad to the even lovelier one-year-old Buttercup, who has the look of someone who will want to go to Yale someday. In short, Frank needs the money, and he's a nice guy, so you should buy this book like I did. It's a mere $1.99. Click on that image over there. I'll wait.

Um, did I say "book"? That might be a slight exaggeration. It's available in Kindle e-book format only, so there's no page count, but it's a 254KB download. And probably a lot of that is the cover graphic. It's a quick read, about the same as one of the longer Atlantic articles about instability in Pakistan, but much funnier.

But it's in the "Book" department at Amazon. And I need to inflate my "books read" count for 2011. So it counts as a book! It counts!

Is it your cup of tea? Here's paragraph one:

It's hard to remember the dark days before 2008. It was a time of hatred, racism, violence, obese children, war, untaxed rich people, and incandescent light bulbs -- perhaps the worst days we had ever seen. And at the heart of it all was a thuggish, thoughtless man, George W. Bush, who lashed out angrily at whatever he didn't understand -- and he understood so very little. Then there was that laugh of his -- that horrible snicker that mocked everything intelligent and nuanced. Also, he looked like a chimp.

Yet another movie where one of the guilty pleasures is a TV sitcom heroine (Jennifer Aniston in this case) doing and saying absolutely filthy things you can't do in primetime. (MPAA: "crude and sexual content, pervasive language and some drug material")

Jason Bateman, Jason Sudekis, and Charlie Day are three buddies, underlings to the titular Horrible Bosses: respectively, Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell, and Ms. Aniston. Spacey is a psychotic tyrant, whipping Bateman into Stakhanovite efforts with promises of a promotion, only to yank the carrot away at the last moment. Farrell is a drug-addled ne'er-do-well, looking to squeeze every drop of profit from his late father's chemical company in order to fund his dissolute lifestyle. And Aniston plays a dentist who's a nightmare combination of every sexual harassment story you've ever heard, trying to wangle hygienist Day into her scary clutches. All three buddies find themselves desperate enough to consider homicide. Being decent sorts, they are hopelessly inept and ambivalent in the execution.

The gags are nonstop, and the actors do a fine job. Especially good is Kevin Spacey, who can play dangerous manipulative nutjobs in his sleep. There are also some amusing performances in smaller roles: Jamie Foxx, Julie Bowen, Donald Sutherland, and Ioan Gruffudd. And Bob Newhart!